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THE 

SONG 

OF 

AGES 

SERMONS 



BY 

REGINALD J. CAMPBELL 

MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE 
LONDON 



NEW YORK 

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

3 and 5 West i8 th Street, near 5™ Avenue 
1905 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 4 1905 

Copyright Entry 

(OcJ. ****** 
CLASS (X XXc. No, 

/ JLfS 14 

COPY B. 



6 






Copyright, 1905, by 
A. C. Armstrong & Son 

Published, October, 1905 



CONTENTS. 

I. PAGE 

The Song of Ages 3 

"A nd they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song 
of the Lamb, saying,Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God 
Almighty ; just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of Saints."— 

IRevelation xv. 3. 

II. 

The Unrecognised Christ 21 

"A nd I knew Him not : but He that sent me to baptize with water, 
the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shall see the Spirit descending, 
and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy 
Ghost." -%\. 3obn i. 33. 

III. 

Where Jesus Failed 39 

'■''And He did not rnany^ mighty works there because of their un- 
belief"- St. flJattbew xiii. 58. 

IV. 
The Divine Equivalent of Pain . ... 59 

"/ will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" — 
3oel ii. 25. 

V. 
The Burning of the Tares 77 

"As the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in 
the end of this world."— QU flDattbeW xiii. 40. 

VI. 
The Death of the Soul 93 

"The soul that sinneth, it shall die."— jS^cMcl xviii. 4. 

VII. 
Wasted Sacrifice in 

" To what purpose is this waste .*"'— St, flDattbew xxvi. 8. 
VIII. 

Hell's Vision of Heaven 129 

"In hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham 
afar off and Lazarus in his bosom."— Qt, Xufte xvi. 23. 

IX. 
The New Birth 147 

'''•Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." 
—St. 3©bn iii. 3» 



CONTENTS.— Continued. 

v X. PAGE 

v The Cleansing Blood 165 

"A Imost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without 
shedding of blood is no remission" — Ifoebrews ix. 22. 

XI. 
The Seed of Abraham 185 

"Put thou, Israel, art my servant Jacob whom I have chosen, the 
seed of Abraham my friend.' 1 '' — Usafab xli. 8. 

"Think not, to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our 
father : for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham."— &\, flDattbew iii. 9. 

XII. 
Joshua's Votive Prayer 203 

ki Then spake Josh ua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered 
up the A morites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight 
of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the 
valley ofAjalon."—JOSb\XSi x. 12. 

XIII. 
Our Father's Business 221 

"He said unto them, How is it that ye sought me ? Wist ye not that 
I must be about My Father's business?'''' — St. Xufte ii. 49. 

XIV. 
Christ the Resurrection 239 

" Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith 
unto Him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the 
last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the Resurrection" — St. Jobn 
xi. 23-25. 

s XV. 

Why Was He Scourged ? . . . . . .255 

"Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged Him." St, $Obn xix. i. 

XVI. 
The Call of Samuel 271 

"Here am I; for thou didst call me."— I Samuel iii. 6. 

XVII. 
The Sword of the Lord 293 

" Think not that I am come to send peace on earth ; I came not to send 
feace,but a sword," —%\i dpattbew x. 34. 



THE SONG OF AGES 



"And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the 
song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are Thy works, 
Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of 
Saints." — Revelation xv. J. 



I. 

THE SONG OF AGES. 

THE Book of Revelation is less a revelation 
than a mystery to the modern mind. Many 
attempts have been made, and some are still 
being made, to explain its purpose and its 
scope. None of these have been, in my judg- 
ment, conspicuously successful; and no doubt 
the greater number of my hearers are well 
acquainted with such attempts, and know how 
varied in character, how mutually contradictory 
they have been. For, the truth is, we have not 
the key to this book; we cannot understand its 
allusions nor its symbolism. Probably that was 
not so with the contemporaries of the writer, or, 
at any rate, with that portion of them for which 
he intended the special teaching herein contained. 
They would, no doubt, understand it, just as 
you would understand veiled allusions to current 
events in books or in the daily press of the 
present time; and it may be that some day we 
shall obtain the key to all this, and will know 



4 THE SONG OF AGES. 

something of what was in the mind of the writer 
when the Book of Revelation first saw the light. 
But at present, I say, it is not a revelation to us, 
it is rather a mystery. And yet it is not all 
obscure; there is a great deal of it illuminating 
and spiritually most helpful; and I have no 
doubt whatever that this mystical book is full of 
meaning from beginning to end, if we only 
knew what that meaning is in every case where 
a strange figure is employed or an obscure 
allusion made. 

One of the most beautiful portions of the book 
for which we do not require any special interpreter 
is the opening verses of chapter xxi. — " I saw 
a new heaven and a new earth . . . And I 
heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, 
the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will 
dwell with them, and they shall be His people, 
and God Himself shall be with them, and be 
their God. And God shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes; and there shall be no more 
death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall 
there be any more pain: for the former things 
are passed away." Here the writer is speaking 
in language that is perfectly plain and clear to 
any age. Our text is another of these beautiful 
and illuminating sentences, but its meaning is not 
quite so obvious as the verses I have just read. 
" The song of Moses and the Lamb " — whatever 



THE SONG OF AGES. 5 

can he mean? Well, we will see, for we will 
turn to the passages in Holy Writ, in which the 
idea is referred to. We will take the song of 
Moses first, and we have not far to look, for it 
only appears once in the Old Testament. You 
will find it in Exodus xv. It is the song of the 
great leader of Israel just after he and his motley 
following had passed in safety through the Red 
Sea : — " Then sang Moses and the children of 
Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, 
I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed 
gloriously: The horse and his rider hath He 
thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength 
and song, and He is become my salvation: He is 
my God, and I will prepare Him an habitation; 
my father's God, and I will exalt Him." 

Now to enter into the full significance of this 
song — one of the most magnificent odes that was 
ever written — you will have to enter into the secret 
place of the heart of Moses himself. We cannot 
do that in its entirety and as it ought to be done, 
but we are able now to measure and to estimate 
the value of the life of Moses as those who stood 
near him could not possibly do. For I believe 
that we have here a real historical character. I 
feel sometimes a little impatient with the theories 
that would explain away the men of mark out of 
history. Legends are spun around the names of 
men who are greater than the legends. I feel that 



J 



6 THE SONG OF AGES. 

there is a forceful formative individuality here, the 
greatest driving power in the history of Israel — 
the man Moses, the servant of God. 

Now, to understand why this song is put into 
his mouth, you must try to enter into his experi- 
ence at the moment when it was first sung. This 
man of faith and courage has been leading a poor 
slave-hearted people out of bondage. There 
never was a more lonely figure in all history than 
he, and not one amongst his following could 
understand the greatness of the sacrifice he had 
made. " By faith Moses, when he was come to 
years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's 
daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with 
the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of 
sin for a season." Thus Moses leaves behind 
him all the advantages of Egypt and the favour 
of its king; and for the sake of his " father's God " 
— I like the phrase — he deliberately chose the 
hard way, the solemn way, the way of Jehovah, 
and now he sings his paean of praise for victory 
granted. It could not have been but that he sang 
it alone; there was not another man in the whole 
host who was worthy to sing it with him. It 
says the host of Israel sang, I know, but, for all 
that, Moses sang alone, and I think the poet has 
really entered into the situation when he makes 
Moses say, "My God, my strength, and my 
song. He also is become my salvation." For 



THE SONG OF AGES. 7 

this man, all alone, has wrought for God, all 
alone has he been chosen to be the deliverer of 
Israel, and even now he sings his song of triumph 
on the very eve of a long pilgrimage. For his 
probation is not over. I pray you not to miss this 
point. Moses is not singing in the promised 
land, he is singing on the desert journey, he is 
singing on the borders of the Red Sea, he is 
singing amid trials and wearinesses innumerable. 
Moses' hardest battles had still to be fought, yet 
he is singing, " The Lord is my strength and my 
song." This, then, is the song of Moses. 

Now, what is the song of the Lamb? It is a 
somewhat difficult task I have before me in at- 
tempting to explain it ; for the very phrase, " the 
song of Moses and the Lamb," has passed into 
our literature, into our devotions, and into the very 
affection of our heart, and I would not pluck it out. 
But what do you really mean when you use the 
phrase? I am afraid some of you only mean that 
the blood-washed throng around the throne of 
God in heaven, whose toils are over and done 
with for evermore, and they alone are entitled to 
sing that song, " Worthy is the Lamb that was 
slain." And amongst them perhaps some of you 
will include the latest murderer who has paid the 
penalty of his crime, and died in the odour of a 
belated sanctity upon the scaffold; or the loath- 
some roue, whose flesh has reaped corruption, but 



8 THE SONG OF AGES. 

who has achieved an eleventh-hour repentance, 
and stands with Moses and the saints of all the 
ages before the throne of God singing, " Worthy 
is the Lamb ! " If you do, you will limit the 
meaning, for that is not what was present to the 
writer of this chapter. He has a long perspective 
here. This man, who was in the spirit on the 
Lord's day, looks as it were from heaven, but it 
was upon earth that he gazed. " I saw another 
sign in heaven, great and marvellous." What 
he saw from heaven was what you and I are 
doing, and he describes the sons of God on earth 
as singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. 
True, it is the song of heaven too, but it is a song 
that is begun on earth, and only those who have 
sung it here are entitled to sing it there. 

Let us see now some of the references to 
this in the New Testament. If you turn to St. 
Mark's gospel — the simplest of them all, the 
least premeditated — you will discover one most 
illuminative phrase in his account of the eve of 
the Passion of our Lord. It is this : " And 
when they had sung an hymn they went out." 
More accurately : " When they had sung a 
song." What was it? It was one of the songs 
of Israel, in which you and I have joined 
in this church. In all probability this was the 
song that Jesus sang on the eve of Gethsemane, 
and in the shadow of Calvary : " Bind the sacri- 



THE SONG OF AGES. 9 

fice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar." 
" I shall not die, but live, and declare the works 
of the Lord." " O give thanks unto the Lord, 
for He is good, because His mercy endureth for 
ever." Now, brethren, consider: twelve men 
were singing that song, and one that had been of 
the company was on his way with busy feet to 
betray his Master; and the other eleven sang as 
loudly as Jesus, we may be sure, like the host of 
Israel on the borders of the Red Sea; but, for all 
that, Jesus sang alone. No other could possibly 
sing that song and know what Jesus knew, feel 
what Jesus felt, do what Jesus did. August loneli- \ 
ness of the Son of God, singing His death-song in 
the shadow of betrayal and torture and death! 
This was the first note of the song of the Lamb that 
was slain; and yet, I say, though it was the first 
note, in a sense, it was not. The whole life of 
Jesus, the oblation that He made from the day of 
His call unto the day of His death, was the song 
of the Lamb that was slain, the song that was v 
heard in heaven, and the song that is sung there 
now. Jesus began His song when He began His 
oblation of the life that was laid down for man- 
kind, and still Jesus is singing that song, for the* 
Lamb that was slain has not ceased His activity: : 
He is going forth to the ends of the earth conquer- 
ing and to conquer. 

Now we will take these passages from the book 



io THE SONG OF AGES. 

before us, and see what light they throw upon the 
scene. In Rev. v. 9 we read : " And they sung a 
new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the 
book and to open the seals thereof, for Thou wast 
slain, and hast redeemed us with Thy blood." 
The opening of the book signified the telling-out 
of the destiny of humanity, and you know in 
whose hands that is now; it is in the hands of the 
crucified, glorified Jesus. He it is who opens the 
book, and one leaf was turned this morning, and 
from the heaven which is not far away, for it is 
in the very midst of us, Jesus read out to-day the 
meaning of your life and mine. In Rev. xiv. 2 
we read : " And I heard a voice from heaven, as 
the voice of many waters." John was listening 
as from heaven, and the voice that he heard was 
not only there, it was here, singing, as it were, a 
new song. "And no man could learn that song 
but the hundred and forty and four thousand, 
which were redeemed from the earth." He does 
not mean that they had been plucked away from 
the earth, for our Lord's prayer had to be 
answered : " I pray not that Thou shouldest take 
them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest 
keep them from the evil." And, lastly, our text: 
" And I saw, as it were, a sea of glass mingled with 
fire"— like the Red Sea— " and them that had 
gotten the victory over the beast, and over his 
image, and over his mark, and over the number 



THE SONG OF AGES. it 

of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having 
the harps of God. And they sing the song of 
Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the 
Lamb, saying: Great and marvellous are Thy 
works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy 
ways, Thou King of Saints." So Jesus from His 
throne, and the saints around it, and the warriors 
on earth, join in one glad triumphant song; it is 
the song of Moses and the Lamb. 

Now I am going to illustrate this. Human 
nature is capable of some wonderful things in 
times of stress. The song that is heard in heaven 
is the life of faith and love and of noble suffering 
bravely borne. In the early days of the Christian 
Church, as I need not remind you, men and 
women, and even children, laid down their lives 
for Christ and lived their lives for Christ in a 
spirit that is not too common now. 

Any of you who have gone, as I have, through 
the catacombs will know that the note of early 
Christian worship was invariably one of joy and 
thanksgiving. These people never hid their heads 
in the shadows ; they sang a song of triumph in the 
midst of tribulation, compared with which your 
life and mine is heaven to-day. Indeed, in all the 
centuries every time that a prophet of God has 
stood forth and the spirit has moved upon the 
face of the waters, that song has been repeated. 
A Sir Thomas More, going to the scaffold in the 



12 THE SONG OF AGES. 

days of Henry VIII for a faith in which neither 
you nor I believe, sang, nevertheless, the song 
of Moses and the Lamb. He had no bitter com- 
plaint to offer, there was no thought of self-pity 
in his mind, he went bravely and quietly to the 
scaffold without a sign of fear, without suggestion 
of pose; it was all one to him: earth to-day, 
heaven to-morrow, both with God. When he 
died he sang, as he had lived, the song of Moses 
and the Lamb. John Bunyan in Bedford Gaol — 
compare him with some of the servants of the 
Most High with whom you and I have to do at 
the present hour. A word of bitterness, of com- 
plaint, of self-commiseration? None at all, rejoic- 
ing only that he is counted worthy to be cruci- 
fied with Christ. Let others pity, but Bunyan's 
life in prison and out of it was the singing of 
the song of Moses and the Lamb. i « 

Now in history there have been other themes 
which are a counterfeit to this experience, and I 
must point some of them out to you. When the 
French Revolution took place, and a well-deserved 
retribution overtook those who held the reins of 
power in that distracted nation, it is said that the 
aristocrats died well, and none of us can withhold 
his meed of admiration for the men and women 
who went to the guillotine without showing a 
tremor in the presence of their foes. Day after 
day some of these men and women of the erst- 



THE SONG OF AGES. 13 

while privileged orders were kept wailing for the 
end; the gaoler came for his toll every morning — 
now seven, now nine, now twenty, now forty, as 
the case might be. He found these Royalists 
always gay, always ready; if he was one short of 
the number a volunteer would make it up. They 
went to the scaffold as smilingly, as serenely, as 
they would have gone to a ball. We feel there 
was something fine in it. So there was; it was 
" playing the game." But there is something 
higher than " playing the game " ; it is singing 
the song of Moses and the Lamb. I need 
only ask how these Royalists look alongside 
Bunyan, and the old-time martyrs, and Sir 
Thomas More, and you can answer the question. 
Take the death of Philip Egalite, Duke of Orleans 
— history has pronounced its verdict upon that 
long ago. Here is a man who, for the sake of 
his petty ambition and to save his own miserable 
neck, swears away the life of his cousin the king. 
They say that a wave of disgust passed over the 
revolutionaries when Philip Egalite mounted the 
tribune, and, leaning his hand upon his heart, 
said : "On my soul and conscience, I vote for 
death " — death to his cousin Louis ; safety for 
himself. Retribution followed, but Egalite " died 
game." Put him alongside a Bunyan and a 
More. The mood is different. In the sight of 
heaven the moral attitude is different; in the hear- 

B 



14 THE SONG OF AGES. 

ing of the angels the song is different. It was 
not the song of Moses and the Lamb that 
the traitor sang. And yet I did hear, not very- 
long back, that song sung at a graveside. It was 
at the funeral of a Salvation Army lassie, and I 
had been asked to officiate — why, I do not know. 
To my astonishment, those who followed her to 
the grave surrounded the coffin, and so soon as 
the service was over, and only the benediction 
remained to be pronounced, they sang together 
songs of joy and gladness. " Why was not that 
note always struck at the funeral of a saint ? " I 
asked them. What was their reason for doing it 
now ? " Ah ! " said the friends of the dead — I 
cannot call them mourners — " because she would 
have wished it so; her life was so beautiful: it 
was itself a song of triumph, and we are only 
doing now around her ashes what she is doing 
before the throne of God." Remember, her 
whole life had been a song — the song of Moses 
and the Lamb. 

Here this morning there may be some good 
woman of whom the world has never heard, but 
whose time of trial has come. Calamity has over- 
taken her home, and she has to bear the burden 
of responsibility for the rest. The strong man, 
the house-band, as he has hitherto been, is crushed 
and broken; he has been flung by fate, a helpless 
bundle, at her feet, What is she to do? Oh, the 



THE SONG OF AGES. IS 

world would say, to " play the game." She has 
got something higher to do than that. The brave 
and cheerful face which she turns to the world 
to-day, and wears in the presence of her suffering 
husband, and with which she blesses her clinging 
children, is singing the song of Moses and 
the Lamb. Here faith in love and God are 
triumphing far from the promised land. Some 
business man whom I address has come to the 
greatest trouble of his life. You have been in 
many a tight place before, my brother, but perhaps 
this is the worst of them all, and the hardest part 
of it to bear is that where you naturally expect 
most sympathy and support you get none. Your 
hearthstone is cold, your home is wretched, there 
is division where there ought to be unity, and you 
are misunderstood where you ought to be 
honoured. Be it so; you stand in a grand succes- 
sion, and yours is a great opportunity to sing on 
the very border of the Red Sea, to which God has 
led you, remembering your yesterdays and your 
forty years' toil, the song of Moses and the 
Lamb. Here is a young fellow whose great 
moral opportunity has come. Hitherto someone 
else has had to fight for him, to bear burdens for 
him, to perform duties to which he was not called. 
Death has made a breach in the ranks; somebody 
has to step in and fill it, and you have come; and 
do you know what they are saying about you, just 



16 THE SONG OF AGES. 

the few that know ? " Who would ever have 
dreamed he had it in him to play the man as he is 
doing now ? " And you know how much it costs, 
and only you can know. But God knows, for 
you have entered into a magnificent succession, 
for which you were appointed to sing the song 
of Moses and the Lamb, and the one thing that 
I wish you and all who hear me this day to under- 
stand is this : that for the purpose of the singing of 
this song heaven and earth are one. Do you sup- 
pose you have some forty years' journey to make 
before you reach the heart of God and the presence 
of the angels? We must reform our views of 
heaven; here is the throne of God in the midst, 
here the song is sung, here is heaven, all invisible, 
but its presence and power are felt in the experi- 
ence of the human heart. Here or nowhere we 
can sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. 

The last time I preached in Free St. George's, 
Edinburgh, I noticed something which, I think, is 
somewhat exceptional in the arrangement of 
churches. The organist sits among the congrega- 
tion. He has a little keyboard in a pew, and the 
great organ sounds above as he presses the keys 
below. Apt figure of the Christian's experience! 
The keys of joy and sorrow are pressed in every 
faithful human heart, and make harmony in 
heaven, whence it floods in blessing over the 
experience of humankind. This is the song 



THE SONG OF AGES. 17 

of Moses and the Lamb. You are singing it in 
union with the blood-washed throng whose con- 
flicts are past, but you are singing it none the less 
really, because you are singing it as Moses sang 
it on the borders of the Red Sea, and as Jesus 
sang it in the shadow of the cross. 

"Do lovely things, not dream them all day long; 
And so make Life, and Death, and that For Ever, 
One grand sweet song." 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 



" And I knew Him not : but He that sent me to baptize 
with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt 
see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, the same 
is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." — St. John i. 33. 



II, 

THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

THIS text can hardly be profitably examined or 
understood apart from its context, and that 
context is strikingly and profoundly interesting. 
The writer of the fourth gospel not only had access 
here to a source unknown to or ignored by the 
synopists, but he uses it most carefully and skil- 
fully. The section concerning the witness of John 
the Baptist to Christ is inserted in its right place, 
and it fulfils an easily-ascertained purpose. What 
was that purpose ? It was to show, I think, that 
John the Baptist was not only the herald of Christ 
in the general, but also in the particular sense. If 
we are to believe the record that is given here, it 
is evident that John, to some company and in 
public — how large the company may have been we 
do not know — announced Jesus by name as the 
Christ, the One whom he had come to proclaim 
to the world. 

Let us examine the circumstances. John had 
come into the wilderness of Judea, baptising with 



22 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

water unto remission of sins. His message was, 
" Repent, for the axe is laid to the root of the 
tree." He announced the advent of One who 
should thoroughly purge His floor and gather 
the wheat into the garner, but burn up the chaff 
with unquenchable fire." There was a general 
Messianic expectation at the time which you and 
I have often considered together. Israel was 
humiliated and weary. It was to a miserable age 
and a down-trodden people that John's message 
came. They were looking for a deliverer, a Strong 
One sent by the God of Israel. They may not have 
thought of Him as divine in the sense in which 
the Christian consciousness would ascribe that 
quality to Jesus, but they did expect a Messiah 
who would carry all before him, bringing in, as it 
were, the kingdom of God with a mighty hand, 
delivering them from their oppressors and from all 
the evil they had brought upon themselves. This 
was the burden of John's message. The fiery 
prophet proclaimed it with his whole soul. 

Now observe, if tradition is to be believed, John 
the Baptist had known Jesus in childhood, and 
he was His relative, a comparatively near relative, 
too. They must have been well acquainted with 
each other, and yet he says in this chapter, " I 
knew Him not." Quite so. It would have been 
perfectly possible for one man to live near another 
and come under the spell of that other without 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 23 

seeing all that was in him. When he says, " I 
knew Him not," he speaks with perfect truth. 
But the events which are recorded in this first 
chapter of St. John are the sequel of the great day 
when Jesus, the childhood's friend and relative 
of St. John, comes to be baptised of him. When 
the Pharisees put the question to John, " Art thou 
He that should come ? Art thou Elias ? Art thou 
the prophet? " His answer was, " I am not any 
of these, but only the herald of the Christ." In 
John's mind, when the question was put, there was 
a thought to which he presently gave expression. 
He remembered the hour, only forty days or so 
before, on which Jesus of Nazareth, his childhood's 
friend, came and asked to be baptised along with 
the penitents. You remember how John shrank 
at the request. It was because he already knew 
Jesus. " I have need to be baptised of Thee, and 
comest Thou to me?" No new discovery this. 
Hence he shrank from administering the rite which 
professedly was undergone by the guilty who 
wished to enter into newness of life. The answer 
of Jesus was, " Suffer it to be so now, for thus it 
becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." John 
did not know what He meant. This was not the 
burden of the fiery prophet's message. But what 
Jesus meant was, Righteousness is righteousness 
indeed when it lays itself savingly alongside of 
unrighteousness, holiness shows itself in sympathy 



24 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

with penitence. The Saviour and the repentant, 
sinner are always near together. And the Jesus 
who went down into the water with John's peni- 
tents had no sin to leave there, no new profession 
to make. But He rose, as it were, in closest moral 
union with those who had now taken a new stand 
on the side of the righteousness of God. John 
saw something on the face of Jesus at that time 
which he had never seen before. I am not pre- 
pared to discuss here or to examine the phenomena 
which took place at the baptism of Jesus. It may 
have been that not a single soul except John the 
Baptist ever saw what is described as the Spirit 
descending like a dove and resting on Jesus. But 
what he did certainly see at that time, hidden from 
the rest it may be, was this — on the face of Jesus 
there must have been that look of lofty self-devo- 
tion wherewith the Sinless One went down along- 
side the penitents, the sublime sympathy of Christ. 
How could it be otherwise than that a heavenly 
radiance shone from that lovely face ? And as 
Jesus ascended from the water and departed into 
the wilderness the Baptist, whose message was, 
"The axe is laid, to the root of the tree," gazed 
on Him with a new reverence. " Surely this is 
He. I saw the Spirit of heaven in the face of 
Jesus!" 

Between the two events which are recorded here 
(in Matthew the baptism of Jesus and in John the 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 25 

proclamation of Jesus), had come the question of 
the Pharisees, " Art thou He that should come? " 
and John with the memory of what he had seen in 
the face of Christ answered with confidence, " I 
am not." But the next day Jesus came again, 
having in the wilderness worked out in His own 
Messianic consciousness the character of His voca- 
tion, the vocation which He well knew was His 
even when He went down into the water. He had 
gone to the wilderness to settle with himself of 
what kind His Messiahship was to be, and as He 
returned to Jordan again He knew after His forty 
days of conflict what He was to do. The look that 
John had seen upon His face he saw once more, 
and something added, perhaps, a look of solemn, 
heavenly dignity. It must have been there, 
whether it is recorded here or whether it is not. 
How could one like John the Baptist gaze in the 
face of one like Jesus and not see it? And so he 
says to those that surround him, " I saw the Spirit 
descending like a dove, and abiding upon Him, 
and yet until then I knew Him not." Yet all this 
time he had known Him ! He that sent him to 
baptize with water — that is, God — and who spoke 
within the heart of the Baptist saying, " Thus and 
such is your message to be," the same voice spoke 
within Him again. " Upon whom thou seest the 
Spirit descending and remaining. He it is that 
shall baptize with the Holy Ghost." 



26 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

This is the inwardness, then, of our text. But 
before we leave the exegesis thereof there is 
another consideration to be thought of. It is 
somewhat surprising that even after this, the great 
crisis in John's mission work, he should have had 
once more to question with himself. Was I mis- 
taken after all ? Is this Jesus whom I have known 
all my life, is He really the chosen of God ? John 
has been imprisoned for his faithful testimony, 
and he is approaching the hour of his death. 
Israel can hear his voice no longer, and he waits 
and waits and waits. " When is He to burn up 
the chaff with unquenchable fire ? Where is the 
sceptre, and where is the sword? If Jesus is 
Messiah I want to hear of something else than 
the lowly mission and a few healings and a new 
sort of kingdom. I want to know of Messiah 
riding to victory at the head of a triumphant 
Israel." So he sends some of his faithful few with 
this question, " Art thou really He that should 
come, or look we for another?" The answer of 
Jesus we have read together to-night. " Go and 
tell John the things ye hear and see. The blind 
receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers 
are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised, 
and the poor have glad tidings preached to them, 
and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in 
Me." There is one remarkable word in the answer 
of Jesus to the questioners, it is the word again. 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 27 

" Go and show John again." Why, when had he 
seen it before? He had seen it at Bethabara be- 
yond Jordan, when he said, " I saw the Spirit 
descending and abiding upon Him." It was not 
the miracles to which Jesus drew attention, it was 
what was behind the miracles. It was as though 
He had said to John, " Here is compassion, here 
is love, here is service — are not these evidence of 
the Spirit of God ? " He is quoting from Isaiah lxi., 
as He had done already, in St. Luke iv., before His 
own people, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel 
to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken- 
hearted, to proclaim deliverance to the captives, 
and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at 
liberty them that are bruised." 

We have now followed the true sequence of this 
series of incidents, and I have thought it worth 
while to dwell upon it so long for this reason. A 
man so exalted in character and purpose as John 
the Baptist, and who had lived with Jesus all his 
life — knew Him intimately one would suppose — 
saw and doubted, recognised and again hesitated; 
and the criterion by which most of all he ought to 
have known Him was one apparently by which he 
judged Him least, the presence of the Spirit of 
God and the tokens thereof in compassion and 
service and tenderness and love. These are the 
real tokens of the Christ in all time. 



28 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

All through history this experience of St. John 
has been repeated. The Christ has gone and still 
goes unrecognised, oftentimes both by righteous- 
ness and by unrighteousness. Mankind is prone 
to be ruled by names. We think when we have de- 
scribed a thing in our accustomed everyday terms 
we know all about it. We do not. Jesus was 
careful never to use ambiguous terms in describing 
His mission and His work. He never employed 
even the word " Christian." In fact, that name, 
now an honourable name, was first given to the 
followers of Jesus in reproach and contempt by 
their persecutors. Be it never forgotten that the 
achievements of the unrecognised Christ are equally 
great with those of the Christ whom men have 
named with the name of Jesus. Jesus came to 
reveal the heart of God ; He came with the revela- 
tion of what constitutes true righteousness, which 
is always incomplete except its final manifestation 
be love. Jesus came to set up the kingdom of 
God not in external institutions first and foremost, 
but in the hearts of men. The world will be 
changed through the lives of consecrated men 
rather than by the remodelling of institutions. 
Character first, and the rest will follow. Jesus 
never employed, as I have said, terms to dis- 
tinguish those who followed Him from those who 
did not, but He spoke about moral and spiritual 
qualities, righteousness, truth, love, sacrifice. 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 29 

Where you see these you have seen Jesus. They 
are the fruit of the Spirit of God. 

When Christianity was first preached in the 
Graeco-Roman world it came as a scandal to many 
well-meaning people, because it brought to man- 
kind a new principle, one that was strange to 
Paganism, notwithstanding its great achievements. 
It was the principle of the cross. And what is 
that? The principle of the suffering love of God 
at war with sin and woe. This is the principle 
of the Cross. The Jews on the one hand were 
scandalised because no token save the insignia of 
shame had been given in vindication of the 
credentials of Jesus. And the Greeks were scan- 
dalised because in their view it were impossible 
for anything so repellent and so sordid as the 
figure of the cross to typify what was highest or to 
reveal what was eternal. "The Jews seek after 
a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we 
preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling- 
block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto 
us who are being saved, Christ the power of God 
and the wisdom of God." Remember, the wooden 
cross and the shed blood on Calvary were but the 
expression of a principle that was eternal. This 
was the last revelation of the heart of God and of 
Christ, the principle of suffering love. Yet some, 
as I have said, the very greatest and perhaps some 
of the noblest of the Graeco-Roman world did not 



3 o THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

see the new and beautiful thing that had come 
with the preaching of Christ. When I was in 
Rome last year one of the most interesting ex- 
periences I had was in visiting the catacombs 
where these first Christians worshipped their 
Master. In those gloomy underground caverns 
the foundations of the faith that you and I now 
know were laid, or shall I say, the church, as you 
and I know it, was made possible. What heroes 
and saints and martyrs issued from those dim 
vaults to torture and death ! And yet one thing 
impressed us all who wandered through those dark- 
some corridors. It was this — the note of joy and 
exultation in the memorials of these early Chris- 
tians took precedence over every other. On the 
martyr's tomb was carved the palm branch ; never 
any expression of commiseration accompanied it, 
but always the note of triumph. It was something 
glorious to have been privileged to lay down the 
life for Jesus and in the service of human kind. 
That spirit is not dead, thank God. If it were, 
then Christ would be gone from the world. What 
struck me, as it has struck many people as strange, 
is this, that some of the blood of those very martyrs 
had been spilled by the order of one of the best of 
emperors. Marcus Antoninus, in the exercise of 
what he thought to be his duty, sent these people 
to death, not seeing what was behind the victory 
of the cross. It was wonderful that he did not 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 31 

see it. He could not recognise the Christ, and it 
may have been that those who suffered under him 
did not see in Marcus Antoninus the marks of the 
same Christ, the tokens of the same spirit. Won- 
derful, that hidden from the eyes of the serious 
moral earnestness of the great Stoic emperor was 
the beauty of the Christ — yet not so wonderful. He 
was hidden, as we have seen, from the eyes of the 
Baptist, who came to herald Him, and who lived 
with Him all his days. Truly, the unrecognised 
Christ has done marvellous things in history ! 

Many times in the history of Christendom itself 
the Christ has gone unrecognised, even by those 
who have claimed to act in His name. There is 
no sublimer and no more tragic chapter in human 
history than the story of the Vaudois, the per- 
secuted saints of the Alps, the heralds of the Re- 
formation ages before it came. These poor simple 
folk, hunted from place to place amongst those 
rugged mountains, were almost extirpated, not 
once nor twice, by those who claimed to be acting 
in the name of Jesus. The very name of Christian 
was denied to them, now that it was no longer 
a term of reproach ; but one with clearer vision, 
John Milton, one of the greatest of our own fellow 
countrymen, wrote concerning them — 

"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, 
E'en them who kept Thy truth so pure of old, 

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones." 



32 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

Why was it not seen sooner? Because Christen- 
dom, like John the Baptist, had not at first eyes 
to see the true tokens of the presence of the Christ. 
Anne Askew, whose name is written up on the 
walls of this building, suffered not many yards 
from where we are worshipping to-night. The 
tender limbs of this poor woman were racked and 
torn, and she yielded up her breath in the flame 
of fire for the very faith which you and I profess. 
And oh, the irony — some of you will say the 
blasphemy, of the time — before her dying eyes 
was held the crucifix, the dying Christ as it were 
reproaching the dying martyr. But did He? 
Ah, no! There is no mistake made in heaven. 
The tokens of the presence of the Master never 
were more evident. And yet it may have been — 
it may have been — serious, earnest men upon the 
persecuting side felt, as the figure of the "Crucified 
was held before the eyes of the murdered woman, 
that the Christ was with them and not with her, 
Jesus, suffering, unrecognised. 

Sir Matthew Hale, sitting on the judge's bench, 
in the seventeenth century, was approached by a 
poor working woman, who begged for the release 
of her husband, rotting in gaol. That husband 
was John Bunyan. And Sir Matthew Hale was 
the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and a 
humble Christian. Oh, how little he saw what we 
see to-day in the inspired Bedford tinker! Like 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 33 

the Baptist, his eyes were holden. He did not see 
his own Lord, but as a modern writer has put it 
beautifully and feelingly, " Long ago in heaven 
Hale and Bunyan have seen in one another the 
Christ that was with both of them all the time." 
Righteousness and unrighteousness alike have 
often missed the vision all history through. But 
our tendency has ever been to confuse forms and 
faith. It may be some of the best and wisest of 
us are making the same mistake now. 

One of the commonest questions that is ever 
put to me, sometimes by those in sore trouble about 
it, has been this: " Here is one dear to me, an 
upright man, whose life is truth, who is prepared 
to sacrifice for the principles he holds dear, in 
whose heart compassion dwells and in whose con- 
duct spiritual manhood is to be read. But, dear 
sir, he does not know my Christ. Do you think 
he is safe? Will there be mercy for him in the 
great day?" That such a question should be 
asked ! What is it that Christ came to do ? Have 
not I shown you what is Christ? " Go and show 
John again the things ye hear and see." He is 
these things. His is the spirit of compassion. 
His is the spirit of mercy, the spirit of sacrifice, 
the spirit of truth, the spirit of manhood. These 
are the Christ. The man who serves these is not 
against Him. Oh, for the heavenly vision that 
may enable him to recognise that he is already 
recognised of Jesus! 

c 



34 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

The thing to be done is to make men realise that 
salvation from sin is not escape hither and thither, 
into this circumstance or yonder environment, but 
in escaping the thraldom of sin and living to 
purity and holiness and truth. This is salvation, 
there is no other worthy of the name. 

And we may make mistakes as to what are the 
marks of truth and what are not. God never does. 
Fidelity to the vision He has granted you to-day 
makes possible the higher vision of to-morrow. A 
man comes to me and asks, " Do you think you 
have retained your baptismal grace?" And I 
reply, " I know not what you mean. I know no 
grace that comes by mechanism. I know only of 
the grace of the humble and the contrite heart. 
Where this is to be found, there is the Christ, 
and with Him is the eternal life of God." 

Another says to me, " Have you not, by your 
form of religion, deprived yourself of a great con- 
solation, something infinitely precious, the fre- 
quent communion of the devout Christian who 
kneels at the altar to receive it?" And again I 
reply, " To him who devoutly seeks his blessing 
there, God has come indeed ; but the real presence 
is not upon the altar but in his own soul. Where 
are righteousness and truth, where mercy and love 
have kissed each other, there is the real Holy Com- 
munion, and I can discern its worth. To enter 
into living relation with the living Lord is the 



THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 35 

great achievement of all spiritual quest. Where f 
Christ is, there is the Christ-like spirit, and " if 
any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none 
of His." Not forms, but fidelity. The Lord lives 
in the heart of the man who has prepared for Him 
there a dwelling-place. I care for nothing but 
moral and spiritual values. Find me these and 
you can make your own forms. Christ cannot 
deny these without denying Himself, and where 
they are He is, even though unrecognised. 

Now, suppose I address one man who has 
followed with sympathy what I have said so far, 
except just this, that when I speak of these moral 
and spiritual qualities as Christ, he hesitates and 
asks, " Is this true? Is the Christ who died on 
Calvary still alive?" Brother, that is my whole 
faith. I believe He lives because of the Spirit 
that descended and abode upon human kind from 
Calvary. I believe that He lives because it were 
unthinkable that that Spirit of righteousness by 
which you are living your life now can ever die. 
I believe that He lives because those glad tidings 
are winning their ever-widening way through the 
nations of the earth. Nay, talk not about Chris- 
tianity decaying and about empty churches and 
faithless preachers, and so on. Show me the 
things which Christ brought into the world and 
I will show you the Christ. Churches may die; 
Christ lives. 



36 THE UNRECOGNISED CHRIST. 

And, my friend, it were better for you, and you 
would be wiser and nobler and holier and stronger 
if you could take hold of the hand of that living 
Christ, and make the venture of faith, and stake 
your all upon Him by name, as may be you have 
already sought to live by what is His. " Blessed 
is he that shall not be offended in Me " — 

"Comes faint and far Thy voice 
From vales of Galilee ; 
Thy vision fades in ancient shades ; 
How should we follow Thee ? 

" Ah, sense-bound heart and blind 1 
Is nought but what we see ? 
Can time undo what once was true ? 
Can we not follow Thee f 

"Within our heart of hearts 
In nearest nearness be ; 
Set up Thy throne within Thine own ; 
Go, Lord ; we follow Thee." 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 



" And He did not many mighty works there, because of their 
unbelief." — St. Matthew xiii. $8. 



III. 

WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

SOME time ago I read the words of a New Testa- 
ment critic on this passage. The view he 
took of its meaning was something as fol- 
lows : — We have here a little hint of what pos- 
sibly occurred many times in the course of the 
ministry of Jesus. Jesus was not uniformly suc- 
cessful in His wonder-working achievements; 
there were times when He failed, and here is one 
of them. It is a mere hint, says the critic, but 
evidently it is the truth. Jesus required a certain 
atmosphere of sympathy, perhaps of credulity, and 
when this sympathy or unquestioning belief was 
withheld, He could do nothing very wonderful. 
The words of the critic recall a scene I once wit- 
nessed in the market place of a Midland town. 
A man fantastically attired was standing on a plat- 
form, with a brass band behind him. He was 
selling some quack remedy, and, in order to 
prove its efficacy, he offered to extract the teeth 
of any of the lookers-on. A long procession of 



40 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

men and women was actually moving up to his 
platform and past his chair, each operation taking 
something like a quarter of a minute. The people 
all came down with smiling faces ; apparently they 
had felt no pain ; if they had given vent to any 
cries, the noise of the band had drowned them; 
and altogether this cheap-jack received a capital 
advertisement. Evidently the New Testament 
critic I have mentioned thought of the works 
of Jesus in somewhat the same light as the per- 
formances of this quack medicine vendor; not 
that he would put Jesus on the same level, but he 
was thinking of Him as a young enthusiast who 
believed in His power to work miracles. He had 
none really, our critic would say, but the people 
around Him believed He had, He believed so 
Himself, and consequently, where this mutual 
confidence was present, He could do some mighty 
works, and where it was withheld He could do 
none. Our critic is right in this, at least, that 
there were times when indeed He could do none, 
when His power failed Him. Whatever we may 
say of the miracles of Jesus, in this instance, at 
any rate, our critic would be within the mark in 
saying He was a failure. 

We are not accustomed to think of Jesus as 
having failed in anything at any time whatever. 
Yet in a certain sense His whole life was a failure ; 
even now His failures are abundant and tragic. 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 41 

Why? Let us examine this particular instance. 

The fame of Jesus had reached to Nazareth, 
where He was brought up, but in that Jewish 
village He had not yet attempted any mighty 
works, and He had never preached there. One 
day He rises in the midst of those who had seen 
Him grow up from childhood; expectancy is 
kindled; and they are not disappointed. For the 
attempt is made, at least, to do exactly the same 
things He had been doing in Capernaum. He 
went into the synagogue, and, as His custom was, 
stood up to read. This proceeding was not at all 
exceptional. Synagogue worship was different 
from Temple worship ; in the former no priest was 
required; any man could stand up and offer to 
read the Scriptures for that day. Jesus turned to 
the book of Isaiah, and read those beautiful words 
paraphrased by St. Luke (ch. iv. 18-19). 

Allow your imagination for a moment to play 
upon this theme. He read the words, as the 
scribes did not, with meaning, point, emphasis. 
Then He gave the book back to the minister, and 
sat down. The eyes of the assembly were fastened 
on Him, and He began to say to them, " This day 
is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." There is 
something omitted by Matthew at this point. They 
began by listening in astonishment, and bearing 
witness that He was speaking gracious words, but 
presently the mood changed, and they began to 



42 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

say, as Matthew has it : " Is not this Joseph's son ? 
Is He not Himself only a carpenter? Is not His 
mother called Mary, and His brethren James and 
Joses, and Simon, and Judas, and are not all His 
sisters here with us?" And they were 
" offended," or, rather, disgusted; they would not 
listen any longer. It was not because He was 
telling them gracious things that they repudiated 
Him, it was when He began to put His ringer 
upon the sore places in their own lives. We can 
imagine the respectable fishermen and fisher- 
women saying to one another, " What impu- 
dence ! This man was brought up in our midst, 
and now He comes here and teaches His betters. 
Joseph has lived all his life amongst us, and never 
says an uncivil word; what a decent body His 
mother is! And as for His brothers, they have 
never been known to take upon themselves the 
office of hector, public teacher, rebuker." They 
were angry, turned Him out of the synagogue, 
and, as Luke vividly and emphatically continues, 
" led Him unto the brow of the hill whereon their 
city was built, that they might cast Him down 
headlong. But He, passing through the midst of 
them, went His way." 

I think you will agree that this is a fairly 
accurate description of what must have taken 
place. What they resented in Jesus was that He 
took upon Himself to rebuke or exhort people 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 43 

amongst whom He had been brought up, who 
claimed to be as good as He was. They refused 
to recognise what He really was, and, though they 
did not openly repudiate the truth of what He 
said, they were offended that He dared to say it. 

Had Jesus any right to expect that these people 
should take Him on trust ? I have read, or heard, 
this text expounded in this fashion. " Alas! here 
was the Son of God, with all His Divine 
credentials and His glorious Gospel, all He wanted 
was that people should believe, and they would 
not believe Him ; they had closed their ears, 
hardened their hearts," and so on. But Jesus had 
no right to expect that they should believe. If 
He had come to them saying, " I am the Divine 
Son of God; you did not know it when I was in 
your midst working for My living; you did not 
see it when I was engaged at the carpenter's 
bench, and even now it seems incredible; but I 
ask you, whether it seems probable or not, to 
believe that before Abraham was I am, that I hold 
the keys of death and hell, that I am master of the 
universe itself " — what would you have done if 
Jesus had come to you with no better credentials 
than He had when He spoke to the people of 
Nazareth and had talked like this? We, too, 
most likely would have taken Him to the brow of 
the cliff and thrust Him down headlong. Perhaps 
we would not have listened as patiently and as 



44 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

long as the little Galilaean audience did ; for, as a 
matter of fact, these claims would have been 
unreasonable in the extreme, and Jesus never 
began to make them. What He did was to read 
this prophecy of Isaiah and offer to His hearers a 
higher life. Graciously He pleaded for it, and 
was drawing men to Himself by so doing, saying, 
11 Follow Me; I am meek and lowly in heart; I 
will show you visions of God; I will teach you 
what the heavenly life means. Forsake the old 
ways; they are not worthy of you. Come, let us 
go together to the Highest." They were not 
prepared for that; they felt a certain resentment 
at His assumption of moral superiority, a certain 
jealousy of His moral worth. Nay, more; they 
repudiated them ; perhaps they were angry even 
more at His rebuke, or implied rebuke, of the 
lives they were then living. If Joseph had kept 
silent so long, if Mary had never spoken, what 
business had this young Jesus, the carpenter, to 
come forward and tell them how to live? Let 
Him hold His tongue. It is not that He does 
not say what is true, but that He says it at all, 
that is the matter. Before we condemn them let 
us ask what we should have done in like circum- 
stances. Jesus never put forward His preten- 
sions; He simply put forward His glad tidings. 
If He came to-day in glory, with His legions of 
angels with Him, there would be no question, we 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 45 

should all receive Him. You may be perfectly 
certain there would not be a word spoken against 
Him in the great metropolis. If Jesus, the King 
of heaven that we sing about, arrived in our midst, 
you may be perfectly sure that young and old, rich 
and poor, wise and foolish, orthodox and un- 
orthodox, we should bow down before Him. But 
He does not come that way ; and yet He has come. 
He is in our midst now ; He has come to-day into 
the synagogue. You have seen Him; you saw 
Him before you came to the synagogue ; you were 
face to face with Him in your own home. He 
did not come in glory. When He came with His 
glad tidings, with His offer of a moral opportunity, 
when His message was whispered to your con- 
science, which can be done without a preacher, 
there were no trappings, no tinsel, no legions of 
angels; it was just the issue between right and 
wrong. How did you treat Jesus when you saw 
Him ? Because, in spite of the denial which I 
feel is already in the hearts of some I address, 
what Jesus of Nazareth stood for, that which Jesus 
of Nazareth brought to the world is pleading before 
the tribunal of conscience in the world to-day, and 
men are treating it just as then they treated Him. 
In one chapter of Miss Marie Corelli's book, 
" God's Good Man," the authoress makes a bishop 
of the Church of England speak as follows : — 
11 Many things appear to me hopeless, utterly 



46 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

irremediable. The shadow of a preponderant, 
defiant, all-triumphant evil stalks abroad every- 
where, and the clergy are as much affected by it 
as the laymen. I feel that the world is far more 
Christless to-day, after 2,000 years of preaching 
and teaching, than it was in the time of Nero. 
How has this happened ? Whose the fault ? 
There is only one reply. It is the church itself 
that has failed. The message of salvation, the 
Gospel of love — these are as God-born and as true 
as ever they were; but the preachers and the 
teachers of the Divine creed are to blame." 

I do not agree with the novelist, certainly not 
in the sweep of the statement. In her zeal and 
earnestness — for they are both suggested in the 
paragraph — she is unacquainted with the facts; 
the world is not far more Christless (curious 
phrase!) to-day than it was 2,000 years ago. If 
Miss Corelli knew what Rome was under Nero, 
she would have hopes of London, bad as it is. 
Christ has been doing mighty works which have 
not always been done on the housetop; His 
greatest victories have been achieved, the world 
not knowing. But it is perfectly true that there 
is failure somewhere, nevertheless. There will be 
a thousand thousand sermons preached through- 
out the world to-day, enough to make it a heaven 
to-morrow. But it will not be a heaven; things 
will be pretty much the same to-morrow as they 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 47 

are to-day. And yet here stand I, amongst others, 
doing my best to hold up a glorious ideal. If I 
could make every man in this congregation do 
what Jesus in this Gospel sets forth for him to do, 
and invites him to do, what a London you and I 
might make between us to-morrow ! But the 
transformation will not be effected; there will be 
rejection somewhere, and it will not be the preacher 
who will be rejected; it will be the Christ. Make 
no mistake as to what is happening. Will it be 
the Church that has failed ? We use that phrase 
now till we have almost come to believe it; yet 
it is only half the truth — hardly that. We wear 
sackcloth and ashes, we worshippers, we Church 
workers. As though the failure of the Church 
could really hinder the Gospel of Christ ! It can 
do so up to a point, but only up to a point. If 
failure has to be chronicled, it will be because con- 
science is obtuse; it is the Master Himself who 
has failed, because of the unbelief of both Church 
and world. 

Let us examine what that word unbelief means : 
If I were to say, " I have just heard that Port 
Arthur has fallen,' ' you would feel disposed to 
question the statement; some of you might con- 
fidently deny it. You would be justified in your 
unbelief; it is simply a question of fact — is Port 
Arthur standing, or is it not? You say, we will 
investigate the matter. If I am wrong, unbelief 



48 WHERE JESUS FAILED, 

is the proper mental attitude for you to adopt. 
But " unbelief " in this passage has no such con- 
notation, no such significance. Our Lord was 
not asking them to accept Him as King of Heaven. 
He did not say who He was; He simply came 
with good tidings about God, with the message 
of Divine love; and then He did more — this was 
just where He failed with His audience — He 
required conformity of life to the standard He 
revealed : — If God is love, let man be love, too ; if 
God is righteousness, let man be righteous; if 
God is purity, let man be pure. Man is not pre- 
pared for these things; therefore Jesus failed. 
Unbelief means want of moral susceptibility to the 
highest God has revealed. Unbelief does not 
mean the rejection of this fact or that, as con- 
cerning, for instance, Biblical criticism. It means 
the keying of your life to a wrong tune, it means 
that you have rejected moral opportunity, hindered 
and slighted the Son of God, taken Him to the 
brink of a precipice, and would have hurled down 
headlong that which came from heaven. Make 
no mistake as to the thing with which we are con- 
cerned when we talk about unbelief. It means 
faithlessness; that is the very word. We have no 
English word to translate this Greek term; the 
word that comes nearest to it is faithlessness. 
Whether you and I are living faithless lives or 
not, we need no one to tell us. If we have chosen 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 49 

the lower in the presence of the higher, then we 
have rejected Jesus, and He can do no mighty 
work because of our unbelief. We speak about 
the failure of the Church ; it is the failure of the 
Christ in the presence of conscience that you and 
I have to mourn. I have here a book by an 
author from whom I learned a great deal in time 
past — " The Revolution in Tanner's Lane," by 
Mark Rutherford. He writes with sympathy, 
pathos, and intensity, about the struggles and the 
sufferings of a class with which he was well 
acquainted. He introduces us to a would-be 
French Revolutionist, living in England before 
the Corn Laws were repealed, and it is the words 
put into the mouth of this man Caillaud that I 
now quote : — 

" There have been many murders decreed by 
court according to law. Was not the death of 
your Jesus Christ a murder? Murder means 
death for base, selfish ends. What said Jesus — 
that he came to send a sword? Of course He 
did. Every idea is a sword. What a God He 
was!" 

This speaker was no Christian, did not believe 
in the Christian creed ; but he seemed as if he leapt 
right to the truth that lies behind every statement 
of Christian faith. It is what Jesus was, morally 
and spiritually construed, that has made Him 
God, whether humanity likes to call Him that 
or not. 



50 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

" He was the first who ever cared for the people 
— for the real people, the poor, the ignorant, the 
fools, the weak-minded, the slaves. The Greeks 
and Romans thought nothing of these. ' I salute 
Thee, Thou Son of the people ! ' And Caillaud 
took down a little crucifix, which, strange to say, 
always hung in his room, and reverently inclined 
himself to it. ' A child of the people,' he con- 
tinued, ' in everything, simple, foolish, wise, 
ragged, Divine, martyred Hero! ' " 

There was the fresh utterance of an earnest 
heart and a noble nature concerning the failure of 
Jesus of Nazareth. But it was not the Roman 
soldiers that cried " Crucify Him! " ; it was the 
people. Oh, the mighty works that have never 
been done that might have been done ! But He 
is despised and rejected of men ; whether He come 
in broadcloth or whether He come in fustian, men 
are not prepared for the standard of Jesus; He 
cannot work out His mighty work, and it is 
because of our unbelief. 

Some years ago Mr. W. T. Stead wrote a book 
which he called, " If Christ Came to Chicago." 
He wrote it because he himself had been to 
Chicago and seen what it was. Chicago people 
did not like that book, and when I visited 
that city they told me so very freely and 
pungently. The reason was that Mr. Stead put 
his finger on a few sore places. They say he mis- 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 51 

apprehended the case. Probably he did; how- 
ever, he saw enough of the truth to make the 
reading exceedingly unpleasant for Chicago 
citizens. That book has given rise to other books, 
amongst them Mr. Sheldon's well-known work, 
"In His Steps; or What Would Jesus Do?" 
Mr. Stead was the true father of the question. 
Supposing now we were to put to ourselves the 
question, " If Christ came to London, what would 
Jesus do? " I repeat, He has come to London. 
Do not look for a Christ with a crown of thorns 
upon His head and Jewish garments on His back, 
standing, as He does in that Royal Academy 
picture, which has attracted so much attention, 
bound to an altar, the people passing Him 
by. I repeat, they would not pass Him by 
if they knew it was Jesus. He has made His 
reputation now, and taken His place amongst the 
world's prophets and martyrs, higher than them 
all. This Jesus is humanity's King and Lord. 
But this Jesus is in London, and failing to-day in 
the streets of London every time a public-house 
door swings open ; failing every time a Christ-like 
ideal is rejected ; failing every time a cowardly lie 
is told in His name. Here is a man getting on 
in business, and deservedly so. Those who know 
and love him best will say he deserves what he 
has got, for he, while his companions slept, was 
toiling upwards in the night; yet men are doing 



52 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

all they can to destroy his little measure of success 
till he becomes established, and then watch the 
world fawn at his feet ! While he is climbing they 
will have him down by fair means or foul if they 
can. He is good, generous, kind-hearted, con- 
scientious ; there is no question about these things. 
But listen to the version of his character that will 
be passed on by unsuccessful rivals. Good, 
respectable people, like that Nazarene synagogue 
congregation, will say all manner of evil against 
him. There is Jesus rejected, standing amongst 
His own. Here is a young lad in a business house 
who is expected by his fellows to fall in with their 
loose habits — to rob the public, to cheat his 
employer. Oh, not flagrantly — he must be too 
careful for that — but in all sorts of mean and dirty 
little ways the Ideal must be rejected, the selfish 
real must be adopted. He refuses; what is the 
result ? They will make his life a hell ; he must 
suffer for righteousness' sake. Well is it for him 
if he has manhood enough to resist the contagion 
of the atmosphere which he breathes. Jesus is 
rejected, and there is the unbelief about which I 
speak. Those who persecute the Lord Jesus must 
believe that it is worth their while, else they would 
not do so; they must believe it were better to be 
like what they are than like what He is, else 
they would not choose the lower. " He could 
work no mighty works there because of their 
unbelief.'* 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 53 

Again, there *s such a thing as Christian 
jealousy. You hear the expression, " He knows 
on which side his bread is buttered." An evil 
motive is looked for. If a man does what pur- 
ports to be an unselfish act, the commonest ques- 
tions are : " What is his game ? What is he aim- 
ing at? What is he going to get for this new 
scheme or device or course that he has taken? " 
We are exceedingly glad to hear of another's mis- 
fortune. We find it easy to believe anything 
against a man who excels us, no matter what the 
cause of his excellence be. We carry self-decep- 
tion so far as to believe that we are assailing a 
man's words or conduct, when all the while we are 
assailing his moral worth. We hear a tale about 
somebody; we say, " We devoutly hope it is not 
true." We mean we hope it is true. We strike 
down Jesus every time that we pass it on — 

" To Thee our full humanity, 
Its joys and pains belong ; 
The wrong of man to man on Thee 
Inflicts a deeper wrong." 

Every man whose lot in life we make harder, 

every man towards whom we think or purpose 

evil, every man whose truth and righteousness we 

refuse to recognise comes to us as Jesus came to 

the Nazarenes. We reject Him through our 

faithlessness. The world is ever ready to applaud 

too late, prone to seek the worst where they might 

have eyes to behold the best. 



54 WHERE JESUS FAILED. 

Some of you are old enough to remember what 
I cannot — the passing of the Prince Consort — an 
instructive example of what I have been trying to 
enforce. To-day we speak in terms of respect and 
reverence of that great and good man who had 
the misfortune to be born in the purple. The day 
before he died the newspapers were shrieking their 
anathemas and venting their suspicion, and pour- 
ing their venom upon him — " the power behind 
the throne," they called him. Yes, it is true, we 
know now : Christ Jesus stood then beside the 
throne of England. To-day we acknowledge it, 
and we call that great and unselfish father of our 
King, Albert the Good. Why did we not see it 
before, realise that in the person of everything 
that is Christ-like Jesus stands in the midst ? Your 
Christ, your Prince Consort, it may be, is with 
you in the workshop, in the office, in the home 
circle ; but you have never yet looked at the truth 
as it is. It is not the vicious and the unscrupulous 
who suffer most. There are some men of whom 
it could be said, if they spent all their lives and 
energies in the service of the devil, they would 
not be half as badly treated as they are in spend- 
ing them in the service of God. God's best ser- 
vants must expect, be they humble men or be 
they placed like the Prince Consort, the penalty 
of faithful living, for the world is faithless. 
Choose which you will serve. 



WHERE JESUS FAILED. 55 

The world never gives, even to itself, the true 

reason for its hostility to the Christ. It never says 

in so many words, " I hate this man's ideals." 

Remember what they said about Him in Galilee : 

" Behold a man gluttonous and a winebibber, a 

friend of publicans and sinners, brought up in 

our midst! Do not we know Him? Hear what 

this babbler saith ! He hath a devil, and is mad ! " 

" It is enough for the disciple that he be as his 

Master and the servant as His Lord." Yet when 

the world sees in Him no beauty that it should 

desire Him, it condemns itself, it has lost its divine 

opportunity. This Christ, this Jesus of the New 

Testament is still here, with His good tidings and 

His mighty works. You will find Him in your 

home to-day. He will accompany you to your 

place of business to-morrow, and stay with you 

there ; you will hear His voice in the warnings of 

conscience and the call of duty. He will put His 

finger on the sore place in your life and character 

and conduct. What will you do with Him ? 

Upon the answer to that question depends what 

He will do with you. 

" O, Lord and Master of us all, 
Whate'er our name or sign. 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
We test our lives by Thine." 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN, 



"I will restore to you the years that the locust 
hath eaten." — Joel ii, 25. 



IV. 
THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

THE Book of Joel is one which Old Testament 
scholarship has found somewhat difficult of 
interpretation for several reasons. One is that it is 
all but impossible to fix, even approximately, the 
date when it was written ; another is the difficulty 
of understanding the historical allusions it con- 
tains ; and a third is that it is not quite clear, as it 
must have been to contemporaries, what the prophet 
means us to understand by the imagery he employs. 
But one thing seems to be fairly evident, and it is 
this : that the occasion which brought the book 
into being was a visitation of locusts which affected 
disastrously one important year in the history of 
Israel. The prophet describes very vividly what 
the effect of such a descent must have been. Any 
of you who have lived in a land where such visita- 
tions are at all common will be able to appreciate 
the force and vigour of the prophet's description : 
" They shall run like mighty men ; they shall climb 
the wall like men of war, and they shall march 



6o THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

everyone on his ways, and they shall not break 
their ranks. . . The earth shall quake before 
them; the heavens shall tremble, the sun and the 
moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw 
their shining." He seems to regard this army as 
the Lord's instrument for the punishment of His 
people for their sins. It may seem to us somewhat 
crude and unwarrantable that every calamity in 
history should be regarded as a mark of the dis- 
pleasure of God against His suffering people; but 
it is not altogether without reason that some 
calamities have been regarded as a mark of the 
displeasure of heaven. Or, shall we say, that 
whether heaven be angry or no it is certain the 
sufferers of earth have deserved what has befallen 
them. The people of Israel appear to have been 
living in sin. The prophet is speaking of a time 
of moral decadence. Such times are all too 
common in the history of that people, as in the 
history of ours. He does not say just what was 
the sin that calls down the particular sentence, but 
he employs this descent of the locusts as a means 
of warning the people that they must turn from 
their evil ways, or they shall be stricken more 
grievously by the hand of the Lord. 

We in our own national history, and even in 
modern times, have had more than one such event 
in which a moral has been pointed by speakers and 
writers. The most conspicuous I can think of 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 61 

within recent years was the date of what was to 
have been His Majesty's coronation. You doubt- 
less remember the shadow that hung over the land 
when King Edward was lying, as it seemed to us, 
between life and death, on what should have been 
the most joyous day of the year. In all the pulpits 
of the land during that week — particularly on the 
coronation day — the moral was pointed, as it might 
have been by the prophet Joel. From this desk 
Dr. Horton addressed a vast assembly of Free 
Churchmen, and told us that God was warning us 
by such a visitation that our national mood had 
not been what it ought to have been; and, like 
other congregations that morning, we accepted the 
warning with somewhat of solemnity and a feeling 
that it was to some extent deserved. We were all 
singing, you recollect, and singing with a new and 
deeper meaning, the lines of Rudyard Kipling's 
Recessional : — 

" Far called, our navies melt away, 

On dune and headland sinks the fire ; 

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre ! 

Judge of the nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget ! " 

Whether or no we were justified in drawing from 

His Majesty's sudden illness the lesson we did 

draw, at any rate you will admit it was needed, and 

it did us good. The prophet Joel is doing here 

precisely the same thing. The people of Israel, 



62 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

the light - hearted, easy - going, pleasure - loving 
people of Israel, as they seemed to him, had been 
living in the sunshine of prosperity; and all in an 
hour this enemy, rising from nowhere, darkened 
the light of day, ate every blade of grass, every 
flower, and every tree before them ; and the prophet, 
taking proper advantage of the people's chastened 
mood, points the moral, concluding by saying, " I 
will restore to you the years that the locust hath 
eaten, saith the Lord." He goes further; he tells 
them of a greater blessing that is waiting, but it 
depends upon themselves whether it is to be 
received : — ' ' Whosoever shall call upon the name 
of the Lord shall be delivered." 

In the history of Christendom a curious use has 
been made of this passage. I doubt not that it 
would interest some of you who are not well 
acquainted with the literature of the early years of 
Christianity if you could just turn up some of the 
fathers and see what they say about this chapter, 
and particularly with reference to the figure of the 
locusts. They tell us in all solemnity that what 
was meant here by the prophet Joel's figure of the 
locusts was that assaults were to be made by heresy 
and persecution upon the well-being of the Church 
of God, but she was to come victorious out of the 
times of stress and storm; and they, therefore, 
quoted verse 28, as pointing to the complete and 
final triumph of that church — " It shall come to 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 63 

pass afterwards that I will pour out my spirit upon 
all flesh. . . And I will show wonders in the 
heavens and in the earth. . . And it shall come 
to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the 
Lord shall be saved." I do not blame these old 
scholars and saints of antiquity for the use they 
made of this chapter, for the prophet himself 
allegorised, and it is difficult to see where actuality 
ceases and allegory begins. But we know that the 
Apostle Peter on the ever memorable day of Pente- 
cost made free use of this historic chapter. On 
that day, when a vast multitude was gathered to 
listen to the simple Galilasans telling what was then 
a new story to the world, but is now the old, old 
story to us, this was the defence made by their 
leader: " These are not drunken, as ye suppose; 
this is but the fulfilment of the word that is spoken 
by the prophet Joel. It shall come to pass in the 
last days, saith God, that I will pour out My spirit 
upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters 
shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, 
your young men shall see visions. . . And it 
shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the 
name of the Lord shall be saved." 

We are then entitled to do what the Apostle 
Peter and the Fathers of the Church and the 
prophet Joel himself have all done with the 
imagery of this chapter. We can spiritualise it as 
they did, for beneath every simplest figure there is 



64 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

a profound spiritual meaning. I take it that the 
spiritual meaning of our text is this : God brings 
forth from all pain a spiritual somewhat for the sake 
of which the pain is sent. There is no waste, no 
wanton sacrifice, in the experience of men ; all 
human sorrow is the substance from which God is 
fashioning holy joy. Every pang of suffering is 
the material of gladness. Suppose we could put 
ourselves in the place of the people who heard Joel 
speak these words for the first time; it is an exer- 
cise worth attempting. Doubtless in that primi- 
tive group — it could not have been much larger 
than a group that heard the prophet speak — there 
would be many people who felt they had lost 
everything; and in utter despair they came, as 
people do when they are brought low, to the man 
who spoke as from the unseen. I do not know 
how they would receive Joel's message; I cannot 
tell how deep it went — no indication is given. But 
try to put yourself in the place of those who heard 
it : would it not have meant more to you, possibly, 
than it seems to mean to us as we read it to-day? 
You have lost everything; the locusts have been 
trie means of its destruction. Yet God says, " I 
will restore to you the years that the locust hath 
eaten." Nay, more; God has a larger, richer 
blessing waiting in the background — the locusts are 
but His instruments to call your thoughts toward 
it, " And it shall come to pass that everyone that 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 65 

shall call on the name of the Lord shall be 
delivered." Now, try further to put yourself in the 
place of the multitude surging in the streets and 
squares of Jerusalem, and listening to a plain-clad 
fisherman on the day of Pentecost; think that you 
are of this Jewish-Roman multitude. It was a sad 
time; men's hearts were weary, there was no open 
vision. It was a time when religion was on the 
decline, as some people declare it is now, when all 
beliefs were going into the melting-pot, and the 
world was full of restlessness and misery and woe. 
Then it was that Peter stood out with beaming face, 
and declared with an accent that the world had 
never listened to before: " These are not drunken, 
as ye suppose ; this is what was prophesied by the 
prophet Joel ; the spirit of the Lord is poured out 
upon all flesh ; this is the great and wonderful day 
of the Lord. Repent, every one of you, and ye 
shall receive remission of sins. For the promise is 
unto you, and to your children, and to all that are 
afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall 
call." Unless I am utterly at fault in my judg- 
ment, you and I would have stood spellbound like 
the rest, for this would have been exactly the 
tidings that we should have been longing to hear. 
Do I ask too much if I say, Listen to me (as if I 
were the leader of the Galilaeans, or even as if I 
were that simple, far-off, shadowy figure whom 
we name the prophet Joel), and I will utter in your 

p 



66 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

hearing the words of my text as though they came 
indeed as a spiritual message from the heart of 
God, and we will try to see what they mean ? 

" I will restore to you the years that the locust 
hath eaten." In the congregation this morning 
there may be many who have come to this place in 
woe and wretchedness because of the years that the 
locust hath eaten. Here are men conscious of vain 
regrets; if the regrets had not been there, it may 
be you would not have been here. So many of us 
are spendthrifts in youth, beggars in age. It is 
not only those that spend their money of whom 
that proverb holds true. It holds true of everyone 
of us in some degree. We are well acquainted 
with the loss of the years that the locust hath eaten. 
Take, for example, that young rake of whom the 
world speaks half pityingly, half contemptuously, 
who has wasted his substance in riotous living. 
We have heard so many morals pointed concerning 
the prodigal, and his figure has passed into so 
many proverbs, that you wonder, do you not, that 
there ever should be a prodigal or a profligate left 
to-day ? Why, the lesson of yesterday was so hard 
and so sad that one would think there would be 
no more fools left to trifle with their youth. But 
there is an old saying, " If youth only would, if 
age only could." With the regularity of a law, a 
menacing, terrible one, comes the tale of ruined 
lives. Those prodigals you know to-day will be 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 67 

followed by others to-morrow. Amongst your 
sons and your sons' sons there will be some who 
live over again the grim and painful experience of 
the man who has wasted his substance, and finds 
that it is given not again. When you and I meet 
to talk over our friends of years agone, how often 
does the pitying sentence rise to our lips, as some- 
one's name emerges in the conversation, " Alas, 
poor fellow, I remember, I remember — but he went 
wrong, you know, years ago." Or, as I heard but 
a few days since, a pathetic sentence is uttered as 
a personal experience from one such ; said a young 
man of whom I know but very little, " My life was 
over at twenty-eight; my golden days are in the 
past." For such as these, who have wasted sub- 
stance, squandered opportunities, flung away from 
them the very constitution that God gave them, 
what is there to look forward to? What is there 
indeed? Only the years that the locust hath eaten. 
How easy it is to point the moral ! The accounts 
of ruined lives of course and obviously are the very 
material with which to point the moral ; but what 
about the other men and women in the pew this 
morning of whom the same thing holds true — that 
whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap ? 
There are many of us who have had a fair measure 
of what the world calls success; you have been 
contented, it may have been, with a modest amount 
of it. Do you know anything of the years that the 



68 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

locust hath eaten ? Have you prosperous ones no 
vain regrets? Have you no yesterdays that it is 
pain to remember? Have you forgotten the mis- 
take that you made years ago in the time of your 
folly, when you spoke a word that to-day you would 
give half you possess to recall ? Have you for- 
gotten that hasty choice ? Have you thought upon 
the act which through guile or malice or thought- 
less selfishness or evil pride you perpetrated? 
What has it cost you ? Years of regret, dark hours 
of pain when the sun was darkened and the stars 
withdrew their shining. Oh, those years that the 
locust hath eaten ! Is it not true, my friend, that 
evil fate seems as though it can be too easily in- 
voked? We shut ourselves up to a destiny when, 
if we could only see our to-morrow, how differently 
we would choose! It does seem oftentimes with 
us, as with Cain, that our act of murderous violence 
has pierced our own soul, and our punishment is 
greater than we can bear. I have a great sympathy 
with any man in this congregation this morning 
who feels almost as if he had been betrayed into 
the worst and most ruinous action of his life; he 
did it, not seeing what lay beyond. Now behind 
and before there stretch for him the years that the 
locust hath eaten. 

Nor does the prophet's word apply only to these. 
I am perfectly certain that up to now I have 
covered the whole congregation, young and old. 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 69 

It is true, for the very youngest is perhaps prepar- 
ing his years that the locust shall eat, and the eldest 
here knows well about them. But what of those to 
whom calamity has come unbidden and unde- 
served? You and I, in our joy at the advent of 
springtime, I doubt not have been taking our way 
into the country, watching the nascent life and 
listening to the singing of the birds. Did you 
notice yesterday in your walks the tree that stands 
black and gaunt and bare, while all its neighbours 
are vendure-clad ? What has happened? One 
shaft of lightning in one deadly moment has robbed 
that tree of all springs and summers to come. 
There are people in our company at this moment 
mingling with us in our songs and joining with 
us in our prayers, but alas ! for them the tender 
grace of a day that is dead will never come back. 
All in a moment, as it seemed, some dreadful truth, 
some malignant change has come like a bolt from 
the blue; and before them now, though they are 
not to blame, there are but the years that the locust 
hath eaten. Have you ever been tempted, dear 
friend, into the borderland of the desperation of 
Job's wife, "Curse God and die"? Well, now 
listen to me, all of you. Those whom I have 
described this morning constitute a spiritual pro- 
blem by themselves, older than their generation, 
older than the generation to which Joel spoke. 
What am I to say about them ? This, and I say it 



70 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

with the greatest deliberateness, weighing well my 
words: All pain, whether deserved or undeserved, 
is God's accumulating blessing in His Divine pur- 
pose, and it has its spiritual equivalent in the deeper 
life that is one with His own. No man can suffer 
except God be with him. Pain is no mark of the 
displeasure of heaven, but just the contrary. It 
is the summons to come up higher; it is the 
reminder of our kinship with the eternal joy that 
is wise with the pain that lies at the heart thereof. 
To know what that joy is — the joy of the Lord — 
you must know what pain is — the pain of Christ. 
All agony is redemptive, both for your own soul 
and for mankind. You endure in, with, and for 
God; in, with, and for humanity; and without 
suffering you cannot know the meaning of the life 
of which all — saint and sinner alike — are in search. 
Yesterday and the day before I followed my 
gardener round the walls pruning the fruit trees. 
I might have put to him this question, " What are 
you doing with that pruning knife in your hand? " 
The heap of wood, living and dead, was increasing 
at his feet, and in my inexperienced judgment it 
would seem as if some great waste were going on. 
But if I had put the question this would have been 
the reply, " I am removing that which is false 
growth ; I am removing death to make life ; for 
every stroke of this knife you shall have the equiva- 
lent in blossom and fruit — the precise equivalent. 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 71 

That which is to be and is not yet is prepared for 
in what is taken away." Years past I remember 
going in the Black Country to a manufactory of 
art pottery. Amongst other mysterious things was 
shown to me the room wherein patterns were 
painted on the ware before the application of the 
heat which made the pattern a part of the sub- 
stance itself. Then I went through the place where 
the burning process was going on, where what had 
been designed in a quiet room at the top of the 
building was being burnt into the very fabric of the 
vessels, which were to be things of beauty. My 
guide showed me one in which the picture was 
marred. I said, " What is wrong? It does not 
seem like the rest." 

" That needs yet a little burning," he said, " it 
would have been worth while to have had a little 
more. You would have had its equivalent in 
beauty." Apt figure! " I will restore to you the 
years that the locust hath eaten." Every unit of 
pain has its equivalent in the purpose of God. I 
wonder what it is that the hand of the omnipotent 
artist has painted on your heart, and has worked 
there with the refiner's fire. Again, some of us 
this very morning have made use of a hotel lift; 
have you ever thought that the height to which it 
raises you is the precise equivalent in foot pounds 
of pressure downward upon a tiny column of water ? 
As is the pressure, so is the result. When I was 



72 THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 

a very little fellow I remember that for a childish 
fault my pocket money was taken from me by 
someone who loved me. I thought it was gone for 
ever, and for me that meant merely what it repre- 
sented in joy, for I had set my little heart on 
something I thought worth while. By-and-bye the 
heart that robbed me of it gave it back again. It 
was not the money that came, it was its equivalent, 
and there was a usury too, and that usury was the 
lesson I had learned. There came back to me 
what I needed most, and rejoiced most over, and 
there came to me a knowledge of how it was done. 
This is the kind of partnership into which we are 
entering with God. There are no mistakes in the 
Divine economy. We say, in our rough-and- 
ready parlance, in our superficial acquaintance with 
life, " What a man sows he reaps." Precisely, and 
why? Because God loves. "Whom He loveth 
He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom, He 
receiveth." By pain we enter into a fellowship 
with the father and mother heart of the universe 
that were well worth the price. " I will restore to 
you the years that the locust hath eaten.'' Then, 
beloved, be glad that you can suffer ; pity the man 
who has yet to learn how. I went down a gold 
mine in Colorado, and someone gave me a piece 
of quartz, such as was piled on wagons before me; 
not much gold could I see in that ugly piece of 
rock. But we knew it had to be broken up and 



THE DIVINE EQUIVALENT OF PAIN. 73 

quarried small, and smelted in a fierce heat; and 
then we should have what we sought. There are 
men of your acquaintance and mine — perhaps we 
have been of the number — who have had to be 
broken from their selfishness and their base con- 
tentments, and to pass through the refiner's fire 
that the purpose of God might prevail in them. 
Of the sinner the promise of our text is true, of the 
saint it is true, even of the Son of God it is true. 
Jesus was made perfect through sufferings, endured 
the Cross, despising the shame for the joy that 
was set before Him. Of the mystery of redemp- 
tion it is true. Redemption cannot begin till a way 
for God's will has been prepared in human heart. 
Paul speaks of deliverance from sin as dying with 
Christ, and of the conscious choice of the ripened 
saint as being crucified with Christ, and beyond 
both experiences, what? "I will restore to you 
the years that the locust hath eaten." " What are 
these that are arrayed in white robes, and whence 
came they ? These are they that came out of great 
tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb." 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES, 



"As the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall 
it be in the end of this world." — St. Matthew xiii. 40. 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

OUR Lord's custom of teaching by parable was 
one which was well suited to the mental habit 
of the simple Oriental audiences He addressed. 
They were used to it. They expected it. Other 
teachers did it. Oriental teachers do it now, 
yet no one ever used this method so sweetly 
and felicitously as Jesus. For His parabolic 
teaching is equally at home in East or West. 
Very precious unto many of us are some of 
the simple stories that Jesus told. How could 
we dispense, for example, with the three in St. 
Luke xv., the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of Silver, 
the Prodigal Son ? But the Gospel that records 
most of these picture sermons is St. Matthew, and 
in this chapter in particular there are several which 
have taken hold upon the imagination of Christen- 
dom, the Parables of the Sower, of the Tares, of 



78 THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

the Mustard Seed, of the Leaven, of the Hidden 
Treasure, of the Pearl, of the Draw Net cast into 
the sea. All these picture lessons Jesus taught to 
an audience of simple men and women under an 
eastern sky. I have said it was a method they 
would well understand, but not everybody under- 
stood. Several times in the course of this chapter 
Jesus reminds His audience that it is so. " He 
that hath ears to hear, let him hear." When alone 
with His disciples He reminded them that no doubt 
there were among His auditors those who heard 
without hearing, those who came idly to listen 
to the peerless teaching which was to change 
the face of the world and men's thought and 
action for all time, and went away as though 
they heard it not. There were a few who wanted 
to know. Of these Matthew was one. When 
they were alone they asked Jesus to explain the 
public teaching. The explanation He gives of the 
Parable of the Tares is noteworthy. While we 
were reading it this evening I dare say many of 
you may have thought that a little expansion even 
with the explanation would not have been out of 
place. 

The Gospel of St. Matthew draws upon several 
sources, the chiefest of them being probably 
Matthew's own notes of what he had heard Jesus 
say. It has been said that St. Matthew has the 
least spiritual imagination of all the evangelists. 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 79 

St. John — if it be that St. John writes the Fourth 
Gospel — expands to such a point that we feel we 
have lost something of the simplicity and the sen- 
tentiousness of the teaching of Jesus. Not so St. 
Matthew. All that he records or nearly so are 
epigrams. He took notes to some purpose, when 
he put down the Beatitudes, for example : " Blessed 
are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." " Blessed are they that mourn : for they 
shall be comforted." " Blessed are the pure in 
heart : for they shall see God." Every one of these 
may have been the heading of a discourse, or 
the title of it, as I gave you mine just now. 
Matthew put that down for himself, perhaps never 
imagining that it should be a famous book. Then 
other hands added incidents in the life of our 
Lord, drew upon contemporary sources for descrip- 
tions of what He said and did, probably true, too, 
and they were put together, and we have St. 
Matthew's Gospel. 

Now I think it not unlikely that St. Matthew 
tells the Parable of the Tares himself in a few 
sentences, and the explanation was put in by some- 
one else who had heard it from those who received 
it from the lips of Jesus. The explanation might 
have done with a little addition, and yet where 
would have been the necessity of the addition after 
Jesus had spoken to those who had ears to hear? 
He is speaking so even now, and in this assembly 



8o THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

to-night there are some who will hear the voice 
and there are some who will not. 

Before we proceed to an examination of what I 
think to be the spiritual lessons, the fundamental 
principle that this our text declares, I want you to 
examine three words in it. The three words are — 
the tares, the world, and the fire. To these three 
we may add a fourth, which is not in the text — 
the angels, who or what are they ? 

The tares. " While men slept the enemy came 
and sowed tares among the wheat." Someone who 
has been to the Holy Land recently by an ex- 
cursion, with which I expected myself to go, 
brought back to me as a present it was thought I 
should appreciate, and I certainly do, a collection 
of the flowers of Galilee, from which Jesus drew 
his figures, and almost the last specimen in this 
book of Flower Life in the Holy Land was the 
tares. I was surprised when I found that the 
tares were almost like the wheat. I am certain 
that none but farmers could have detected that 
the tares were not wheat. I am told the difference 
can only be discerned by the inexperienced at the 
harvest time. Then, the tares fail to look like the 
full corn in the ear. Jesus is speaking here 
evidently of a vicious something designed to mar 
the goodly harvest. What is it? Well, hear His 
explanation. " The field is the world. The good 
seed are the children of the kingdom. The tares 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 81 

are the children of the wicked one." It seems very 
simple, but does Jesus mean that the wicked one, 
whoever he is, created bad men and brought them 
into the world on purpose to spoil the destiny of 
the good ? That could not be His meaning. There 
is only one Creator, whether there be a personal 
power of evil or no. Creatorship does not rest 
with an evil one, but with God. No, that is not 
all Jesus has to say about it. " The Son of Man 
shall send forth His angels and shall gather out 
of His kingdom all things that offend (cause to 
stumble, or, literally, all the scandals), and they 
that do iniquity." It is plain, then, that by the 
tares Jesus means every principle of evil, every 
occasion of wrong, every seed of foulness, hideous- 
ness, loathsomeness, in human nature or experi- 
ence. He means things to begin with, but not 
only so, He means men, the men that cause these 
things are included with the tares, the men whose 
characters are a compound of all the things that 
do offend are counted as of the things that work 
against God. Read the sentence again — " Shall 
gather out of His kingdom all the things that 
do offend, and they that work iniquity." These 
are the tares, the things and the men who are on 
the side of evil. Mark, I have just said that 
there may be, or there may not be, a captain of 
the host of evil. But we can scarcely think about 
evil at all as a principle, antagonistic and inimical 



82 THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

to human life, without thinking of it under the 
figure of a personality. For my own part I fail 
to see why there may not be a captain of 
the host of evil. It is consistent with omnipotence 
that there should be. We act as one another's 
devils often enough, and there is room for larger 
viciousness than you and I have ever had any 
opportunity or power to display. Yet God reigneth. 
The fruit, then, of the personalised power of evil, 
whether it be things or men, Jesus terms the tares. 
Now, what am I to say as to the world ? It will 
be no news to those present who are acquainted 
with their Greek Testament that in this parable 
of the Tares there are two words for " world " that 
are translated in the English by one. Listen and 
I will read you the two separately. "The field 
is the 'world.'" The Greek word for that is 
K6afio%, " As the tares are gathered and burned 
in the fire, so shall it be in the end of the 'world.' " 
The word for that is altbv. They do not sound 
alike, do they? Do you suppose that Matthew 
made a mistake when he used the two words in- 
stead of one for ideas which the English translators 
thought to be so nearly identical as to be trans- 
latable by one? No, I am sure he did not. If 
he said koct/jlo? he meant Koa-fio^, If he said alcov 
he meant alcov. The latter word is equivalent to 
one with which you are all familiar, aeon, a vague 
period of time, age, if you will. Thus when Jesus 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 83 

speaks of the "world" in our text He is not 
speaking of the tcdo-fios, that is, the great universe 
of stars and suns, and mountains, and trees, and 
flowers, and men, and women, and little children. 
He is speaking of this age, any age, yours, mine. 
" So shall it be at the consumation of the age," 
the winding up, the gathering of effects from 
causes, the consummation of a process, whatever 
it may have been. 

Thus our text says, " As the tares are gathered 
and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end 
of this age." What are we to say is the meaning 
of the fire? Those of you who have your Bibles, 
turn with me to a few illustrative passages, and we 
shall discover something. It is a favourite figure 
of both Old and New Testaments to express or to 
describe God's cleansing judgments upon men and 
nations. In Isaiah lxvi. you will read, " With 
fire and sword will God plead with His people." 
Turn to the Book of Malachi, the one which im- 
mediately precedes Matthew, and we find there 
something even more suggestive still — in the third 
chapter, at the first verse: "Behold I will send 
My messenger, and he shall prepare the way be- 
fore Me. And the Lord whom ye seek shall 
suddenly come to His temple, even the messenger 
of the covenant whom ye delight in. Behold He 
shall come, said the Lord of Hosts. But Who 
shall abide the day of His coming, and who shall 



84 THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

stand when He appeareth? For He is like a re- 
finer's fire." Turn now to St. Matthew iii., the 
book that follows this remarkable statement which 
was evidently in St. Matthew's mind when he gave 
us his description of the work of the Baptist, verse 
ii, "I indeed baptize you with water unto repent- 
ance, but He that cometh after me is mightier 
than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear. He 
shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with 
fire." Jesus and fire, the refiner's fire ! Turn now 
to St. Luke xi., 39: "I am come to cast fire on 
the earth, and what if it be already kindled?" 
Who is the speaker? The gentle Jesus. And He 
spoke truth then, irresistible, unmistakable, if ever 
He did so in parable or without. Turn to 1 Corin- 
thians iii., 13, and let us read together once more. 
" If any man build upon this foundation [Jesus 
Christ] gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, 
stubble, every man's work shall be made manifest, 
for the day shall declare it." " And the fire shall 
try every man's work of what sort it is. If any 
man's work abide which he hath built, he shall 
receive a reward. If any man's work shall be 
burned, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall 
be saved, yet so as by fire." Turn now to 
Hebrews i. " He maketh His angels spirits, His 
ministers a flame of fire." Better still, " He 
maketh His angels sweeping winds, his ministers 
a flame of fire." 

This introduces us to the fourth word of which 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 85 

I spoke. Who or what are the angels? God's in- 
struments, God's means. God's messengers, the 
bringers of God's judgments. God's angel oc- 
casionally in time past has been the guillotine, 
God's angel has been the barbarian who stood with 
fire and sword at the Christian's gate, God's angel 
has come as plague, pestilence and famine to a 
guilty nation, God's angel to you and to me has 
been the angel of judgment we individually know 
and need no man to tell us of, when we were tested 
by Him whose angels are sweeping winds and His 
ministers a flame of fire. Brethren, if Jesus really 
found ears to hear Him and to understand, and 
He must have done or there would have been no 
Christianity, what a wonderful teaching this was, 
this parable of His, in which He spoke of God's 
dealings with institutions and nations and men ! 

For we have illustrations of it ready to our hand. 
We could take a thousand from what the men and 
women in this congregation already know. We 
are sometimes told by Catholic apologists that the 
Reformation in this country was the work of an 
adulterous king, and the nation forsooth submitted 
to his will, and the ancient faith was swept out of 
the land simply because the monarch spoke and 
said, " Thus and so shall you believe and live." 
On the other hand, extreme Protestant apologists 
will tell you that the Reformation sprang from the 
revolt of men's intellects and consciences against 



86 THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

the doctrines of the Church of Rome, which had 
ruled for a millennium, and could be borne with 
no longer. True historians know better. Both are 
wrong. Great events never proceed from petty- 
causes. It was no fiat of Henry VIII. that made 
the Reformation in this land after a thousand years 
of unquestioned • rule on the part of the Church 
of Rome. Neither was it an intellectual revolt 
against doctrine. No, not one twentieth of the 
people of this country wanted a change of doctrine. 
When Queen Elizabeth of famous memory came 
to the throne her subjects were by no means 
Protestant, and it may be questioned whether she 
was. What was it, then ? It was the uprising of 
moral passion against an unworthy clergy, it was 
the corruptions of the church, the evil lives of those 
who should have been the shepherds of the people, 
that destroyed the dominion of the Pope in this 
land. So it had been long prepared for, but the 
priestly hierarchy never put forth greater preten- 
sions than on the eve of the Reformation. There 
came a day when they could not abide the coming 
of the Lord. Suddenly did He come in His 
temple, and in one terrible blast, as it seemed, 
of the sweeping winds of the Most High, the 
iniquities and absurdities of Rome were swept out 
of the land. It was a moral revolt. Behind the 
protest of conscience is omnipotence in any and 
every age. 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 87 

The French Revolution was prepared for in like 
manner, and men did not know it. Never did the 
French monarchy seem to stand stronger than 
under Louis XIV. Not even Napoleon at the 
height of his power ever gave law to Europe as 
did Louis le Grand. And yet within a few short 
years of the death of this monarch the cry of a 
people that had long been oppressed by cruelty 
and tyranny broke out, and the streets of Paris ran 
with blood. France passed through the fire. Who 
shall say that God was a mere looker-on ? Do you 
think God never interferes in history? He inter- 
fered in our immediate yesterday and is watching 
in our to-day. The tares are being burned with 
unquenchable fire, unquenchable because God 
lights it, and the judgment from which there is no 
appeal is ever proceeding. 

The gossips are busy to-day with the confessions 
of Oscar Wilde in " De Profundis," as they were 
busy yesterday, as it seems, with the tragical death 
of Whitaker Wright. I never care to employ such 
life histories in this pulpit as illustrations, if they 
are only introduced to be reprobated. There is 
something despicable in the public disposition to 
trample on a fallen man. Men who worshipped at 
the shrine of Whitaker Wright when he was in 
the heyday of his prosperity, and bowed the knee 
and submitted judgment to Oscar Wilde when he 
was on the pinnacle of his fame, cursed them both 



88 THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

when fate hurled them from their eminence into 
Tophet. And yet, brethren, they are types and 
examples of what Jesus teaches in this thirteenth 
chapter of St. Matthew, and as it is true of them 
it is true of all mankind. God has time to watch 
and rule in the life of a man as he has in the life 
of a nation or a church. Oscar Wilde confessed 
that his life was one long quest for pleasure. He 
had reduced self-indulgence to a science. The end 
was ignominy, shame, and a living death. Oh the 
pity, when the tares were burned away and 
there were left but the embers of a wasted life! 
Whitaker Wright lived for gain, but in the end, 
when the wood and the hay and the stubble that he 
had built upon the foundation God gave were 
burned away, in one tragic moment, what was left ? 
Only a life that courted death. 

It is possible that I address men who are carrying 
about with them guilty secrets, black and hideous 
as those of Oscar Wilde or Whitaker Wright, 
only the world does not know, and men flatter you 
as they flattered them, and they wait upon you 
and toady for the little advantage you can confer 
as these kings of society once were in a position 
to do. I do not say that exposure waits for you. 
There are some things worse. You may die what 
you are now. No tongue will reveal your inmost 
soul. What of that? God is waiting and makes 
no blunders. " The fire shall try every man's work 



THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 89 

of what sort it is." What are you building? 
What are you sowing ? 

There are some, again, who are beginning to 
find out that the fire is burning, but still the world 
does not know it. Take that lonely man who has 
been living a self-centred life, in which he was a 
deceiver not only of the world without but of the 
nearest and dearest, and his own soul itself. The 
hypocrisy which is hypocrite to itself is the worst 
of all. The tares look like the wheat to the man 
who prefers to live to the tares. Sir, what has 
come to you ? You are beginning to be found out, 
not by the world, but by your children maybe, 
and your own heart is misgiving you that the 
course you have taken and the life you have lived 
are a blunder after all. By the time the children 
begin to find out, not what the father has done, 
but what he is, and full affection and loyalty and 
faith are withheld, do you tell me that the fire 
is not burning ? God has made His world so 
that the guilty who suffer in their guilt would 
change places a thousand times with the men who 
suffer for righteousness. You never need to exer- 
cise your compassion upon the man whom the fire 
has tried and found his building good. He is 
one whose gold comes pure out of the refiner's fire. 
The rest — the wood, the hay, the stubble — have 
gone. 



9 o THE BURNING OF THE TARES. 

" Sowing the seed by the dawnlight fair, 

Sowing the seed in the noonday glare, 

Sowing the seed in the fading light, 

Sowing the seed in the solemn night, 

What shall the harvest be ?" 

God's lightning, His flame of fire! 

" Sowing the seed of a lingering pain, 
Sowing the seed of a maddened brain, 
Sowing the seed of a tarnished name, 
Sowing the seed of eternal shame, 
What shall the harvest be ?" 

" He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh 
reap corruption, but he that soweth .to the Spirit 
shall of the Spirit reap eternal life." 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 



"The soul that sinneth, it shall die." — Ezekiel xviii, 4. 



VI. 

THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

THIS sentence is really the climax of an argu- 
ment. It is the conclusion, for the sake of 
which this chapter was written. It occurs 
more than once in the course of the chapter. The 
prophet's aim is to emphasize individual in the 
stead of collective responsibility for sin. That 
is, the stress should be placed upon the pronoun. 
" The soul that sinneth, it shall die." It will not 
be the nation, it must not be some other soul or 
souls, for " every man must bear his own burden." 
"The soul that sinneth, that shall die." 

Yet this sentence can easily be misunderstood, 
and, in fact, often has been misunderstood. Some 
have a wholly erroneous idea as to what it means. 
The best way to understand any scripture phrase, 
or any saying, scriptural or otherwise, is to seek 
to apprehend or to get into the mental atmosphere 
of the man who first wrote it. When you have 
done that, you may find that the saying means 
much more than he himself saw. But you are on 



94 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

the right line to discover the larger meaning of 
the words when you have placed yourself en rap- 
forty as it were, with the sentence as it was first 
spoken. For example, there are few clergymen in 
the Church of England to-day who could or would 
subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles precisely in 
the same sense as the Elizabethan theologians who 
drew them up, and, no doubt, it would greatly 
surprise some of those who had the making of them 
if they could come to life again and hear the 
interpretation that is put upon them now. One 
man affirms that they mean such-and-such, and 
another declares that they mean almost the direct 
opposite. Now, the proper way to focus a contro- 
versy concerning the true meaning of the Articles 
would be for those who use and cite them to get 
as nearly as they possibly can into the mental 
and spiritual atmosphere of the time that gave 
them birth. They would then probably find that 
the truths which the Elizabethan divines were 
struggling to express, and which were greater far 
than their modes of expression, are still precious, 
are still living, and, therefore, it would be perfectly 
legitimate for those who subscribe to the Articles 
to-day to interpret them in a larger, but not a 
wholly new, sense than that intended by those 
who first enunciated them. 

Again, it is possible that some who hear me 
speak from this pulpit from time to time may 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 95 

take more out of some special sermon than I ever 
put into it. That is true, I think, of all real 
preaching. Every man brings his experience to 
the prophet's utterance, and I am sure that you 
will pardon me for reminding you that what God 
gives me to teach from this desk is, in so far as I 
am faithful, prophetic utterance, differing only in 
degree, not in kind, from the prophetic utterance 
that we have read in each other's hearing to-night. 
But you might take a particular sentence, some 
one of you, and go home turning it over and over 
in the light of the experience of the past week or 
the past, year or the past decade, and say to your- 
self: " I wonder if the preacher really knew him- 
self how much there was in that sentence ? " And 
you would be right irt believing that he did not 
know. All truth is eternal, and the full orb of it 
no man living in time has ever yet been permitted 
to see. Your experience will shed new light upon 
an old saying, a saying too great probably for the 
experience of the man who utters it. But your 
reading of it, and your reviewing of it, must not 
falsify his who is the author of it. So it is with 
all Old Testament or New Testament Scripture. 
So it is with the text. I have heard questions 
asked about this text, and they have been put to 
me and to other ministers in the following form. 
This text has been a pivot of controversy. Some- 
one will say: "Does the prophet mean" — or, 



96 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

rather, they do not usually say, " Does the pro- 
phet " — "Does the Bible mean that 'to die' in 
thfs sentence is to perish utterly and for ever, or. 
does it mean that the sinner must be punished for 
his sin and suffer for ever?" Put it again — 
"Does 'to die' mean to perish utterly and for 
ever, or does it mean suffering for sin that shall 
endure for ever?" Now we will ask Ezekiel. 
That is the way to do it. We will take the man 
who first wrote this sentence; and remember, 
too, in all probability, before it was written 
at all, it came white hot from his lips. Suppose 
we had this old Israelitish prophet with us to-day, 
and that we interrogated him concerning the 
meaning of his own words. I can assure you 
that he would be most astonished to hear the 
questions which I have just repeated. He would 
say: " I was not speaking of mortality or immor- 
tality, I was speaking of the quality of life, and 
I was thinking for the moment of the immediate 
future of my beloved Israel." Let us follow him 
through the experiences that made him say this, 
and you will see very soon what he means. This 
prophet is a prisoner. He is in the hands of 
Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. He is one 
of the Israelitish remnant that have been torn 
from their home and by whom the plaintive song 
is sung, " By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat 
down and wept, we wept when we remembered 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 97 

Zion." But these captives were not all that there 
was of Israel. There was still an Israel at home, 
and a very bad Israel it was. And this Ezekiel, 
who was a contemporary of the Jeremiah who 
wrote the Lamentations over that wicked Israel, 
was looking from his land of captivity far away 
to the Jerusalem from which he had been torn, 
and was speaking to his fellow captives thus : — 

" Beloved fellow prisoners, our day of deliver- 
ance is coming, but it can only come after yonder 
evil Jerusalem is razed to the ground. Ours it 
shall be to rebuild the temple, ours it shall be to 
worship God in a purified sanctuary in the home- 
land once more. Yonder Israel is preparing her 
own destruction. As a nation she must perish 
for her sins." " But," he would continue, " some 
of you, though you have known the hardships of 
captivity, the humiliation, the degradation that 
were inflicted upon you by the foe, have not been 
living worthily of the high destiny of restoring a 
nobler Israel. Beware what you do. God will 
not blot out the nation again, but He will blot out 
the individual who mars His purpose. Beware, 
you selfish, unpatriotic, slave-hearted men, who 
are living contentedly in the abominations of the 
Babylonians. We shall go to the homeland, but 
the soul that sinneth here, unworthy of the high 
calling, shall die to Israel, shall be outside the 
covenant. It will not be the nation that shall 



98 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

perish; it will be the sinful soul." By soul he 
simply meant man. By die he meant remain a 
slave, or bear the penalty of exclusion from the 
glorious return. 

Since Ezekiel wrote we have learned a good 
deal more as to what is meant by the word " soul." 
But, as I said at the beginning of the sermon, we 
have learned nothing that contradicts what Ezekiel 
saw and declared. The principle upon which* he 
laid emphasis here is this, that the man who is 
doing wrong to his God does wrong to himself. 
He is not worthy to rebuild the Temple. He is 
not worthy to return to the Holy Land. And no 
nation will suffer for him. God's purposes can- 
not be foiled. The soul that sinneth, and that 
alone, must perish — do not be too literal — be shut 
out from the great destiny of the chosen nation, 
whatever it may be, here and now. " The soul 
that sinneth, it shall die." 

Now what are we to say " the soul" means? 
Bear with me while I trace in a few words the 
history of the term. In the earlier portions of this 
marvellous Book of Books the word "soul" 
means little more than the animating prin- 
ciple of all organisms. " The soul " means 
the breath of the life that distinguishes the 
things which are organic from the things which 
are not. Trees and flowers in that sense have 
and are souls. " Let everything that hath 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 99 

breath — let everything that hath soul — praise 
the Lord." Then it came to mean, as we see, by 
a narrowing but by an intensification of its mean- 
ing, the animating principle of human conscious- 
ness. And so the word, delimited, gradually 
expanded its meaning at the same time that it 
narrowed it, until in the New Testament and in 
the later prophecies of the Old Testament, the 
word soul simply means the man. But in the 
New Testament again we read, " Body, soul, and 
spirit." If the Bible were treated as if every term 
meant exactly the same thing everywhere, like 
a mathematical formula, we should be landed in 
extreme perplexities, for the truth is that some- 
times the word soul means spirit, sometimes spirit 
is no more than a synonym for soul. But when 
in Pauline language we speak of body, soul, and 
spirit, we are speaking of three different ideas. 
The body is the vehicle and instrument of the 
soul, the soul is the sheath of the spirit, the spirit 
is the deathless divine, the spark of God's fire that 
is in every man, that essence of His own Being 
without which none of us could exist, and which 
none of us can destroy. The soul is man's con- 
sciousness of himself, as apart from all the rest 
of the world, and even from God. The body 
might be here in all its parts, and yet we should 
say of some one who has left us that he is gone. 
What we mean is that that which distinguishes 



ioo THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

him from all other humanity, and even from God, 
his consciousness of himself, our consciousness of 
him, has departed. That is what we mean by 
the soul. The soul is in a sense the use that a 
man makes of his own divinity, the soul is the 
moral and spiritual consciousness of a man. The 
spirit is something you can neither make nor mar ; 
the soul is what you make it. 

What are we to do with it, this soul of ours, 
this that marks me as me apart from all man- 
kind? Why, to fill it with God. " This is life 
eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true 
God." Death is the absence of that fellowship 
with God. It is to vitiate that for the sake of 
which you were given into your own custody, it 
is the outer darkness, and remember the outer 
darkness may be here, and we may be living in it 
now. 

Now we begin to understand what Christ meant 
— that it were possible for a man to gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul. In other words, he 
is destroying the God-like within himself, he is 
failing in that for which he was created. He is 
perishing even where he seems to succeed. What 
shall it profit a man if he gain all upon which he 
has set his heart and forfeit his own soul ? This, 
again, is what Paul means when he says he dies 
to himself that he may live to God. " Ye died, 
and your life is hid with Christ in God." 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 101 

Death to self, life to God, for to live to one's 
self is to die to God. Nor is this false to what 
the prophet we are speaking of here says, " When 
the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness 
that he hath committed, and doeth that which is 
lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive." 
The question of questions for any of us is this, 
" What kind of soul are we building? Is our 
attitude lifeward or deathward ? Are we destroy- 
ing that beautiful thing that God has given into 
our keeping? Are we marring the divine image 
within our hearts ? Or do we live that life eternal 
which is life indeed, and which is to know God 
and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent? " 

I am afraid lest, in speaking in these terms, I 
may seem to be using language that is too abstract 
and doctrinal. If so, I cease to use it from this 
point. We will now speak about the same truth 
in relation to ordinary, average human experience 
or acquaintance with life. Do any of you 
know what it is to have a childhood's companion 
or a youth's friend of whom much was 
expected, but the promise has never been ful- 
filled? Do you remember that lad who sat 
beside you in the day-school years ago of whom 
the masters and proud parents said that one day 
the world would ring with his name ? The boy 
was endowed with almost every gift that could be 
thought of for making his way in life. Well, 



102 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

what has come to him? We have lost sight of 
him for a few years, maybe, and yesterday we 
met him. What was it that gave us a shock and 
a thrill, a sudden sinking of the heart, as we 
looked into his countenance? Why, this — some- 
thing was missing that ought to have been there, 
and something was there we never thought to see. 
The thing that was missing was life, and the thing 
that was present was death. That man has lived 
to the flesh, and of the flesh has reaped corrup- 
tion. In doing it he has limited, imprisoned, 
destroyed his own better nature, until now, all 
involuntarily as it were, as you look on the beast 
that gazes out of his eyes, you shudderingly say : 
"He is utterly without soul." "The soul that 
sinneth, it shall die." 

Have you ever had to do as I have, with seeking 
to comfort a brave man because of a wrecked 
home? Have you ever listened to a testimony 
like this : Speaking of a drunken wife, one would 
say: " Ah, you see her now, but you did not see 
her as she was. I can remember the day when I 
took this woman to my fireside, fair as an angel 
of God, pure and good as she was beautiful. But 
now you cannot see the angel I saw then. Now 
she is shifty, untruthful, insincere, impure, 
degraded in thought and mind; giving way to 
one vice, she has opened the door to a thousand 
others." But what is wrong? There is some- 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 103 

thing missing that should be there, and once was, 
but she has killed it. It is Soul. Poor creature, 
she has been committing moral suicide. No 
hand but her own has struck the blow. Verily 
"the soul that sinneth, it shall die." It is soul 
that is missing ; that beautiful soul that was taken 
home to the husband's heart years ago has become 
materialised and bestial now. " The wages of sin 
is death." 

Once more : Perhaps some of you young fellows 
are in the grip of a man, in business, and under 
whom you get your living. He is not worthy of 
your respect. You Know well that you are of no 
value to him. High-mindedness is a disadvantage 
as far as your service of that man is concerned. 
He is hard, unscrupulous, a schemer, a man who 
would cut your throat to make a sovereign. And 
these things content him, and that is his life. 
You may meet such men with seared consciences 
and blunted spiritual susceptibilities every day in 
your City life. Would you believe it, my lad, 
that man was once a boy, innocent, childlike, and 
pure of heart as you were? It may be that as a 
youth he, too, had his nobler ambitions as you 
have them now, and if those who knew him better 
than you and I know him could tell us his life's 
story they could trace step by step and point by 
point how that man strangled the life out of the 
true manhood that was in him, Now he does not 



104 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

feel and he does not care as you feel and care for 
him. He has destroyed something that was once 
there. It is soul that is missing, and he is the 
murderer. " The soul that siririeth, it shall die." 
To show you that I am honest in applying 
spiritual truth to ordinary every-day life and 
thought — doctrine has but a subordinate part to 
play in it — let me show you a different picture. 
Amongst my circle of friends there is one whose 
name you may probably have heard, a man well 
advanced in years, and better known to an earlier 
generation than to yours and mine, I mean George 
Jacob Holyoake. This man is not a Christian, 
but those who have any acquaintance with his 
record know that he has done a good many 
Christian things. I have been reading lately a 
book in which he has put some recollections of 
his past. He calls it " Bygones Worth Remem- 
bering," and in it he tells the story of some of 
his moral activities and of the men with whom 
he shared enthusiasms in earlier days. Amongst 
those who called him friend were General Gari- 
baldi and the patriot Mazzini. In this book he 
tells of an occasion on which Mazzini, who was a 
God-intoxicated man, and whose motto was " God 
and the People," reasoned with him and with 
Garibaldi on their materialism, and gave utter- 
ance to a sentence of this kind: " No man with- 
out a sense of God can possess a sense of duty." 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 105 

Garibaldi instantly retorted impetuously: "But 
I am not a believer in God. Have I no sense of 
duty?" "Ah!" said Mazzini, with a smile, 
" You drew in your sense of duty with your 
mother's milk." I could not read an incident like 
that without a feeling akin to reverence for these 
great souls with a great ideal. Holyoake served 
his generation well, so did Garibaldi, so did Maz- 
zini. They were men of soul. Would you deny 
that they possessed moral and spiritual life ? These 
men were all alive. Mazzini 's theology gave way 
in the presence of the splendid fact. It is the 
quality of the life into which we have to examine. 
There is no question but the life was there. In 
contradistinction to the roue I have described, and 
the hard materialistic man of business I have 
described, and the poor drunken harlot I have 
described, think of a Holyoake, a Garibaldi, a 
Mazzini. In a world where there is not too much 
moral earnestness, where men care far too little 
about interests higher and grander than their own, 
well is it that God has filled some men with such 
moral courage and high enthusiasms. If Gari- 
baldi had seen and Holyoake had seen what I am 
going to cite to you now, that soul-life of theirs 
would have been a still richer, grander thing. 
Will you let me read to you from the story of the 
life of John G. Paton, the veteran missionary, 
as told by himself, an account of the daily 



106 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

habits of his father and the influence it had on 
his life ? That father was a stocking weaver, a 
poor man in one of the poor districts of Scotland. 
11 But," says J. G. Paton, " he was a man of 
prayer." There was one little room in between 
the " but " and the " ben " of that house, as the 
Scots call it, into which he retired daily, and often 
many times a day, " and," says the son, 
" we children got to understand by a sort of 
spiritual instinct, for the thing was too sacred to 
be talked about, that prayers were being poured 
out there for us as though by the high priest 
within the veil of the Holy of Holies. We occa- 
sionally heard the pathetic echoes of the trembling 
voice pleading as if for life, and we children 
learned to slip out and in, past that door on tip- 
toe, and not to disturb the holy converse. The 
outside world might not know, but we knew 
whence came that happy life, that new-born smile 
that was always dawning in my father's face. It 
was a reflection from the divine presence in the 
consciousness of which he lived. Never in temple 
or cathedral or mountain or glen can I hope to 
feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly 
walking and talking with men than under that 
humble cottage roof of thatch and open work. 
Though everything else in religion were by some 
unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of my 
memory or blotted from my understanding, my 



THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 107 

soul would wander back to those early scenes and 
shut itself up again in that sanctuary, hearing 
still the echo of those cries to God, would hurl 
back at doubt with the victorious appeal, ' he 
walked with God; why may not I ? ' " 

Now I want you, young and old, who could 
not have written that passage, to weigh well this 
fact, that the experience of this old Scottish 
weaver, which cast such a spell on the life of his 
son, is as much a fact of the universe as the rain 
that is falling outside, and it needs to be accounted 
for and given its due place. It is the most 
precious thing in the whole range of possible 
human experience that a man might walk with 
God, that the light eternal might shine in his 
heart, that the soul might live. Truly this is life, 
to know Goci and Jesus Christ whom He hath 
sent. There is no other life that is life indeed. 
11 He that sinneth against Me wrongeth his own 
soul: all they that hate me love death." 

Contrast again in your mind for a moment this 
experience with that of the man you will meet to- 
morrow, of whom you will say, such an one is 
dead to right feeling, such another is dead to 
truth and honour, and, saddest of all, perhaps, 
you may say of some cynical, selfish being, he is 
dead to love. 

But what are you doing? You are either 
marching towards the ideal of Paton's father or 



108 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL. 

you are marching away from it. To be as full of 
moral passion as a Holyoake or a Garibaldi is 
better than to live for self or the world alone. 
But how few there are who know what true life 
is. This humble Scottish peasant who walked 
with God knew where it was to be found. Do 
you ? In my greenhouse sometimes I see a plant, 
from which I expected something, marring its 
promise. One tiny speck of rust on a white petal, 
and I know my plant is doomed. That speck is 
death ; there will be another to-morrow, and yet 
another to follow. Presently the soul, so to speak, 
of my little plant will be destroyed. Every time 
you commit a sinful act you destroy something 
beautiful which God made to bloom within your 
nature, you have a speck of death upon your soul. 
And every time you lift heart and mind and will 
heavenward, and every time your being aspires to 
God and truth, and every time the noble and the 
heroic and the beautiful have dominion over you 
(for these are God) then you are entering into life. 
"The soul that sinneth, it shall die. , ' "But if 
by the Spirit a man do mortify the deeds of the 
body, he shall live." " For the wages of sin is 
death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through 
Jesus Christ our Lord." 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 



"To what purpose is this waste ? "— M atthew xxvt 3. 



VII. 
WASTED SACRIFICE. 

SOMEWHAT of mystery surrounds the story of 
the anointing of our Lord in Simon's house. 
Most modern commentators think there were two 
anointings, both taking place in the house of a 
man named Simon, but in the one case Simon the 
Pharisee, and in the other Simon the leper. An 
old Roman Catholic tradition insists that there was 
but one anointing, Simon the Pharisee and Simon 
the leper being one and the same ; and, more start- 
ling still, and to some minds repellent, Mary of 
Bethany and the woman who was a sinner the 
same. From Matthew xxvi. it is clear that the 
anointing and the betrayal of our Lord were very 
near together; John xii. shows that the person who 
anointed Jesus after the death of Lazarus and imme- 
diately before the betrayal was Mary of Bethany, 
and we have our Lord's word for it that this 
anointing was done with a view to His burial. 
With a view to His burial ? Surely it was an act 
of grateful homage, because He had just brought 



ii2 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

her brother back from the dead, and the ointment 
which was intended for the body of Lazarus she 
now offered for the burial of his Master. What- 
ever the motive may have been, this was a loving 
service rendered in anticipation of a coming 
tragedy. Jesus had just announced to His disciples 
the crucifixion in plain terms, but they — dull-witted, 
ambitious, slow to understand — passed the remark 
by unheeded. Not so Mary. With a woman's 
swift insight she detected the presence of death in 
this guest-chamber, she saw it on the lowering 
brow and the cruel faces of the Pharisees, she 
heard it in their whispered plottings, she discerned 
it in the covetous countenance of Judas. So it 
may have been that the alabaster box was produced 
and the tears were shed because she saw that her 
Master was doomed to death. 

Observe what follows. Judas speaks first : — " To 
what purpose is this waste ? This ointment might 
have been sold for three hundred pence, and given 
to the poor." John's caustic comment is, " This 
he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because 
he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was 
put therein." The chagrin which he must have 
felt at the rebuke of the Master had something to 
do with the promptitude of the betrayal, which is 
told in the succeeding few verses. It is remarkable, 
too, that the word " waste " is used again, very 
close to this scene, but this time by our Lord. In 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 113 

His last prayer, while the feet of the betrayer are 
on their way to the place where He is, He says : 
" None of them is lost but the son of perdition " — 
i.e., the wasted one. It is the same word in both 
sentences. We know what was the motive of 
Judas, but the evangelist says also that the 
disciples n had indignation " — literally, the dis- 
ciples "angrily protested" — saying, "To what 
purpose is this waste?" Then Jesus flings His 
protection over the woman with the sad comment, 
" Why trouble ye the woman, for she hath wrought 
a good work upon Me? For ye have the poor 
always with you," though you are not always 
thinking about them ; " but Me ye have not always. 
For in that she hath poured this ointment on My 
body, she did it for My burial." It is not all 
waste: !' Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this 
gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there 
shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told 
for a memorial of her." There was a partial 
answer to the question, " To what purpose is this 
waste ? ' ' The act of mournful homage performed 
by Mary at Bethany before the betrayal was not 
waste at all. To-day we recognise the spirit that 
prompted the deed, and in so far as we have 
learned to love and follow Christ we are willing in 
the same spirit to offer to Him what we have. 

The question in its essence is asked to-day in the 
course of every seemingly fruitless sacrifice. We 



H4 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

are all familiar with the phrase, the waste of 
Nature — 

"Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shrieks against our creed, 

So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life." 

"So careful of the type?" It takes her aeons 
to produce a type that she will destroy in an hour. 
Nature is prodigal of her physical experiments, and 
she recks not of the pain that she causes. But to 
what purpose? many are asking to-day. To what 
purpose is the waste of sentient life upon this 
planet ? Mr. H. G. Wells has issued a book whose 
theme is a phenomenon produced by the discovery 
on the part of some scientist of what he calls " The 
Food of the Gods." Its effect is to make men grow 
forty feet high, and stronger and perhaps wiser 
than they were before. He makes one of his 
giants, just waking into mental adolescence, ask 
over and over again, " What is it all for? " The 
" little people," the rest of mankind, shut the giant 
up in a chalk pit, and make him work for their 
benefit. He questions with himself, " What is it 
all for ? What does it mean ? What do the little 
people mean ? What does anybody mean ? What 
do I mean ? What is it all for ? To what pur- 
pose?" The novelist thus answers the question 
through the mouth of another of his giants : — 

"It is not that we would oust the little people 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 115 

from the world, in order that we, who are no more 
than one step upwards from their littleness, may 
hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight 
for, and not ourselves ... to serve the spirit 
and the purpose that has been breathed into our 
lives. We fight not for ourselves, for we are but 
the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the 
World. . . . Through us and through the 
little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us, 
by word and birth and act, it must pass — to still 
greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this 
earth is no playing place ... we fight not for 
ourselves, but for growth — growth that goes on for 
ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth 
will conquer through us. That is the law of the 
Spirit for evermore. " 

I feel a serious purpose underlying Mr. Wells's 
words and what seems the extravagance of his 
conception. He is urging that there may be a 
serious purpose at the back of the universe, making 
itself dynamically felt in the experience of human- 
kind and of all beneath humankind. But we are 
only instruments, not ends ; we are but here to-day 
to serve to-morrow, a to-morrow in which we have 
no share : all our joys and all our sorrows count as 
nothing in the vast, inexorable, mighty process. 
" To what purpose is this waste?" Mr. Wells 
would say that it is for a larger to-morrow. Well, 
but to what purpose is the waste of that which is 



n6 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

making the to-morrow and is in our midst and 

manifested through our lives to-day ? Most people 

will feel that this theory is all very well for the vast, 

vague, undreamed-of future, but it is poor comfort 

for the present. Yet you read this very lesson all 

through human history. Men serve a greater than 

they know : — 

"The best men doing their best 
Know peradventure least of what they do : 
The nail that holds the wood must pierce it first, 
And He alone who wields the hammer sees 
The work advanced by the earnest blow." 

Yet to what purpose is the waste of any noble life 

in the service of an invisible to-morrow? Dr. 

Parker in some of his moods used to speak as 

though the only immortality he desired was to 

live on in the work and in the record of the City 

Temple. Some of you feel he was worth a larger 

immortality than that. But I will go back beyond 

Dr. Parker, to the minister whose very name is 

unknown to some who worship here. The founder 

and the first minister of the church which to-day 

worships in the City Temple, Thomas Goodwin, 

in 1640, looking forward upon the history of his 

beloved country, did not dream of this audience, 

and did not see his present successor. Thomas 

Goodwin, chaplain to Cromwell — grim, serious, 

high-minded, Puritan divine — could not foresee the 

England of to-day when he took his stand for 

ecclesiastical liberty in a contest that for the 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 117 

moment failed, but in the long years won. Good- 
win's immortality is proclaimed in what we are 
and in what we enjoy. Is it enough ? Not a man 
among you would think it is. If that be all, great 
as the price is, and willing as he might be to pay 
it, we should say the man who could pay the price 
was worthy of a larger immortality still. " To 
what purpose is this waste?" Richard Baxter 
might have been Archbishop of Canterbury, but 
he lived and died a dissenting minister in a Mid- 
land town. To what purpose, said his contem- 
poraries, is this waste? If Baxter were here he 
could tell you by what England is to-day. 
Baxter's championship of the rights of conscience 
did not seem to bring any very clear and magni- 
ficent results, and even if it had we should feel that 
the life of Baxter was entitled to something more 
than England has even yet garnered. A Chilling- 
worth, resisting on the one side the superficial, 
heady, evil-living cavalier, and on the other the 
grim intolerant Puritan, himself stood for tolera- 
tion. They persecuted him, even to his death-bed, 
and the last request he made was only for liberty 
to die in peace. If I could summon Chillingworth 
from his grave to-day, his verdict upon the result 
of his brave witness, so apparently unavailing, 
would, I think, be an optimistic one. Yet men 
who loved him then were entitled to ask, and pro- 
bably did ask, as he died, an unavailing witness 



n8 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

for a distant ideal, " To what purpose is this 
waste?" My point is that it is not sufficient to 
say that Chillingworth did the work without know- 
ing all that he did, and gained the victory without 
being aware that there was an inevitable victory to 
be gained : we feel that Chillingworth himself was 
entitled to live to see it in time or in eternity; if 
not, the victory has something sinister in it after 
all. " To what purpose is this waste? " 

To bring home the question to your minds, have 
you ever considered that you have entered into this 
great succession yourselves, and that your law and 
your testimony are no more hopelessly obscure 
than that of these great ones who have passed, as 
some would tell us, into dust — the eyes and the 
hands of the powers of the universe for a moment, 
nothing more? Are you yourselves content to be 
paving stones upon a road that is being made 
broader and stronger for after-ages to walk upon ? 
Oh, I am glad if you are willing to be, but in the 
name of eternal right I would claim for you a 
larger destiny, otherwise to what purpose your 
anguish and your toil ? 

" We are builders of that city, 

All our joys and all our groans 
Help to rear its shining ramparts, 

All our lives are building-stones ; 
But the work that we have builded, 

Oft with bleeding hands and tears, 
And in error and in anguish, 

Will not perish with our years. 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 119 

"It will last and shine transfigured 

In the universal plan ; 
It will help to crown the labours 

Of the toiling hosts of man. 
It will last and shine transfigured 

In the final reign of right, 
It will merge into the splendours 

Of the city of the light. 5 ' 

" To what purpose is this waste? " " To build 
the city of God." But most of us who try to live 
for an ideal not only want to serve it : we want to 
see it realised, else we shall be asking, " To what 
purpose is this waste? " What about the wasted 
love and pain of all the centuries — the love and 
pain that have failed? Richard Baxter can look 
down to-day with larger other eyes, if so be that 
God has permitted him vision, and he can see the 
triumph of the rights of conscience. A Chilling- 
worth can look upon a toleration approximately per- 
fect; here we worship under our own vine and fig 
tree, none daring to make us afraid. A Thomas 
Goodwin can see the cause that went down in blood 
raised again in triumph; England is doing honojr 
to the sons who served her in ages past. Even a 
Joseph Parker, only of yesterday, can look upon 
to-day with a feeling of thankfulness, and say, " I 
have laboured ; others have entered into the labour ; 
the work endures; God has the glory." 

But what about those, the great nameless host, 
who cannot say this — the people whose tears have 



i2o WASTED SACRIFICE. 

fallen into the ground and perished in nothing- 
ness and been forgotten — the people whose anguish 
was as a cry that went up to a black heaven and 
a deaf God, the people whose broken hearts have 
no remedy in this world and no token and no wit- 
ness for the next, that the purpose for which they 
sighed, for the sake of which they suffered, 
the rights that they lived to serve, have been 
God secured, or that there is aught divine to 
hear and heed ? What about the anguish that has 
failed? I am now thinking about an old woman 
whom I knew years ago, and who may be alive 
yet, into whose experience there came somewhat 
such as I have described, and, most cruelly, toward 
the end of life. She and her husband took some- 
body else's child to their hearts, having no child 
of their own. Everything that love could do for 
that little one was done for her. There was no 
lack either of money or of tenderness, and the high 
character of this foster father and mother should 
have been enough, one might think, to secure the 
girl's future. What became of her? Happily, 
that true father went home before the trouble came ; 
the poor mother did not. That girl brought shame 
on a grand old name ; she wrecked the home, broke 
that mother-heart, and, what is more, she gloried 
and persisted in her shame. Her whole nature 
seemed to change and harden ; when last I heard 
of her she was as bitter and brazen as she had ever 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 121 

been, wallowing in her sin. When we think of 
what went before, of the anguish endured by that 
simple-hearted, godly woman who brought up the 
girl, I feel something of the indignation of the 
disciples who witnessed the squandering of the 
precious ointment, " To what purpose is this 
waste? " I do not even ask the obvious question 
why, in the later days of her life, was this poor 
woman permitted so to suffer; we will go beyond 
that question : to what purpose was the waste of 
holy ointment, of unselfish service? I will try to 
find the answer presently; if there is one, we will 
seek to discover it. Let me give you another in- 
stance. One Sunday morning, after service, I was 
accosted by a gentleman, a man of education and 
position, who looked what he was, a man who could 
front the whole world. He had lived a Christian 
life, and when I use that word I would withdraw 
from it every suggestion of cant; I mean that he 
was a Christ-like man, and, as often happens, he 
had a skeleton in the cupboard ; he had the torturing 
problem of another's evil life to mar the peace of 
his own. He said to me shyly, and with an 
apology for troubling, " You have so much to do 
with young men, and from your pulpit you speak 
to so many, that some day you may happen to find 
my lad. If you do, I hope you will tell him that 
I do not feel hard towards him ; we are heart-broken 
at home — I do not mind saying so," Then, as he 



122 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

turned to leave the vestry, he added, " He was the 
child of many prayers." I have never found his 
lad, I do not know whether he went home, I could 
not tell you who the father is ; but this is the ques- 
tion which is in my heart, and I doubt not in yours : 
" The child of many prayers. To what purpose 
was it so?" Imagine what it all means. The 
father and mother kneeling in the vacant chamber 
praying for the child that was once a baby nursed 
by both, loved by both, exulted over with the love 
of a God-like fatherhood and motherhood. They 
prayed for him — oh, you may be sure if he is not 
home they are praying for him to-day. What a 
prayer! There is heart's blood in it. "To what 
purpose is this waste? " Before I pass on, let me 
speak directly to you face to face and heart to heart 
about your own problem. Here is one, it may be, 
to whom God gave a great capacity for love; it 
was crucified. Your life has been spoilt for you ; 
man or woman, you gave your best. Cruel, chaotic 
world! It was taken from you, and nothing has 
come in its place. What is the song you are 
singing? 

" I have a room whereinto no one enters, 

Save I myself alone ; 

There sits a blessed memory on a throne. 
There my life centres. 

If any should force entrance he might see there 

One buried, yet not dead, 

Before whose face I no more bow my head, 
Or bend my knee there/ 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 123 

To what purpose was the waste? Husband or 
wife, father, mother, child, who knows the problem 
of standing between another's sin and the reproach 
of mankind, I am going to speak to you. What a 
tragedy is his who tries to shield a guilty secret 
not his own from the cruel cognisance of the world ! 
Someone you dearly love, and for whom you would 
die a thousand deaths, has a vice which means ruin. 
You have been trying, trying all you know, and all 
your soul will allow you to do ; you have laid your- 
self upon the altar of God's service, and are seeking 
to purge out that vice, and to save that loved one, 
and that the world should not know. But the truth 
is coming out; utterly useless is your consecration 
and your unselfish vicarious sacrifice ; the world is 
whispering, and to-morrow you will feel as though 
every bird that flies in heaven is telling the story 
of the sadness of your home. To what purpose 
your wasted energy, unselfish prayer, and noble 
sacrifice? God only knows. The meaning is to 
be sought in this : our solidarity with Christ the 
Crucified. That does not simply mean resignation 
to a Calvary and a silent tomb; no, that is not all. 
All holy solicitude is a divine touch; you are but 
God's finger — His is the heart behind the hand. 
" It is God which worketh in you both to will and 
to do of His good pleasure." " My word shall not 
return unto Me void, but shall accomplish that 
whereunto I sent it." Dwell on those words. " My 



124 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

Father worked hitherto, and I work." How long, 

Lord Jesus? "Until the day break and the 

shadows flee away." " He shall see of the travail 

of His soul, and shall be satisfied." The universe 

is all of a piece; we do not commonly allow God 

a big enough arena in which to work His mighty 

work, nor is Mr. Wells's giant-world as big as the 

real world in which God reigns. The further world 

and the hither world are locked together. God 

knows thy sighs and counts thy tears; God shall 

lift up thy head. Nothing that is of God can 

perish. This life you live is His, not yours; these 

prayers you utter were His before they became 

yours. In time or in eternity God's word of truth 

prevails. 

" Be sure that God ne'er dooms to waste, 
The strength He deigns impart." 

A last thought I would leave with you — to me the 
most precious of all. We speak'much about judg- 
ment — judgment upon evil-doing. Have you ever 
thought about the judgment upon righteousness? 
These two are one. The judgment upon evil-doing 
is paralleled by the judgment upon well-doing. 
We say of this man, who is sowing to his flesh and 
of the flesh reaping corruption : Exactly what he 
sow t s he shalf reap; he is putting out his life at 
usury, and he will pay the last farthing. We say 
that, and most of us believe it in our best 
moments—* 



WASTED SACRIFICE. 125 

" Sowing the seed of a lingering pain, 
Sowing the seed of a maddened brain, 
Gathered in time or eternity, 
Sure, ah ! sure, will the harvest be." 

" Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." Now turn the obverse of the coin. We 
believe that the weeds come up : are we to believe 
that the good seed dies? We believe a tree of 
self-indulgence bears an evil fruit, a harvest of 
agony : does the agony endured beforehand bear 
no fruit? No, the one judgment involves the 
other, and completes it. It is just because there is 
a judgment that vindicates love that there is a judg- 
ment upon sin. I would speak to a young man 
whose conduct illustrates this principle. You have 
been doing your best to ruin your life, and with it 
the peace of a nobler than yours; you have been 
breaking your mother's heart, dishonouring your 
father's name. You know what a long life-ache 
you have given them : what is the end of it ? You 
say, in desperation, " I know the end, do not tell 
me it is coming: already I have the first fruits of 
that bitter harvest." Have you? Young man, 
God is going to hurt you as sure as to-day's sun 
has risen, He is going to break you because some- 
one is praying for you. Gathered in time or eter- 
nity, what will the harvest of anguish be? God 
will turn the loving prayers of those whom you 
have treated so badly into flames of fire, and they 

I 



126 WASTED SACRIFICE. 

will scorch you back into purity, that purity you 
wickedly flung away. " He maketh His angels 
spirits and His ministers a flame of fire." O 
vicarious sufferers, your prayers are going on, your 
tears are not forgotten, your nobleness is bearing 
its usury, and, like the crucifixion of our blessed 
Lord — like it? included in it — that love of yours is 
pleading in eternity. Autumn sun, why are you 
shining ? There will be no more harvest this year : 
the leaves are falling, the flowers are dying, the 
winter is coming. Autumn sun, why are you 
shining ? Because, while the earth remaineth, 
seed time and harvest shall not cease. It is for the 
spring time the autumn sun is shining now. " He 
that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious 
seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, 
bringing his sheaves with him." 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 



" In hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth 
Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom." — St. Luke xvi. 23. 



VIII. 

HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

THE story before us is a good example of our 
Lord's method of teaching by parable; and 
it is also characteristic of St. Luke's gospel that 
it should find record here, and not in the other 
evangelists. I say it is a good example of our 
Lord's parabolic teaching, because none of us, I 
suppose, imagines that Jesus meant us to take the 
story literally and in all respects just as it stands. 
Neither did His hearers imagine that He was 
giving here the sum and substance of a veritable 
conversation between their ancestor Abraham and 
one of their own day who had passed into the un- 
seen. No, this is a parable, and, being a parable, 
we must look for its spiritual lesson, and it should 
not be difficult to come upon the meaning our 
Lord sought to convey. 

Again, as I have said, it is characteristic of St. 
Luke that this narrative is to be found in his 
gospel alone. The authorship gives us some clue 
to the meaning of Jesus when He told it. For 



130 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

Luke invariably shows pity and tenderness for the 
lot of the poor and the heavy laden. More con- 
spicuously than Matthew, Mark and John, is this 
the case with what he records of our Lord's words 
and his own setting of them. Why is it so? 
Well, in all probability because Luke had been 
in danger of being a type of the rich man here 
described. Luke, the beloved physician, like St. 
Paul, was educated as a Pharisee. His early days 
were passed among the cultured and the wealthy. 
Like the Pharisees, he might have trusted in his 
own righteousness and despised others, especially 
the forsaken and the down-trodden. I say he 
might, but then he met Jesus, and his whole out- 
look upon life was changed, and far more com- 
pletely, probably, than even if he had been brought 
up among the poor. He saw Christ's poor with 
the eyeS of Christ, and learned to sympathise and 
to help. That aspect of the Gospel he made 
particularly his own which he expresses in his 
setting of the Beatitude, "Blessed are ye poor," 
the equivalent of Matthew's " Blessed are the poor 
in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." 
Jesus probably used both expressions. 

Well, brethren, if this gives us a clue to the 
narrative, and I think it does, let us examine to- 
gether its main features before we proceed to at- 
tempt to penetrate the lesson it contains. 

First, then, we have the figure of the rich man, 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 131 

who is clothed in purple and fine linen, and fares 
sumptuously every day. There was no crime in 
being clothed in purple and fine linen, nor even in 
faring sumptuously. No specific sin was laid to 
the charge of the rich man who is introduced into 
the parable. But, reading between the lines of 
Luke's sympathy with the poor, and of the force 
of the Greek phrase, " even the dogs licked the 
sores of Lazarus," we may see that our Lord 
intended to warn the proud Pharisees who were 
listening to Him. This man was rich in wealth, 
in position, in opportunity, but along with these 
came a temper of mind and a moral attitude which 
were unlovely. This man had the true Pharisaic 
spirit, the spirit of those who bound heavy burdens 
upon men's shoulders, but would not so much as 
touch them with the tips of their fingers. He had 
no pity to spare for the beggar at the gate, who 
sought for the crumbs that fell from his table. It 
is not so much what he did, or what he left un- 
done, for which the rich man is to blame; it is 
for what he was, it is for the set of his character, 
it is for the way his face was turned. Purse-proud, 
hard, gross, materialistic, content with things as 
they are, and without a thought for things as they 
ought to be, such is the character of the rich man 
as suggested here. Remember that Jesus has the 
Pharisee in mind, and you have the clue to the 
kind of rich man He is describing. 



132 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

Now, as I have just said when I adduced the 
experience and training of St. Luke, there was 
nothing blameworthy merely about the fact that 
he was rich. Jesus consorted with such. If Luke 
himself was the son of a rich man, and brought 
up amid refinement, as was probably the case, he 
was not the only one in the intimate circle of 
Jesus of whom this could be said. Lazarus of 
Bethany was most likely a rich man. He was 
not of the chosen circle of the twelve, but he was 
of the intimates of the heart of Jesus, yet the son 
of a Pharisee. It may have been that it was in 
the Garden of Lazarus that Jesus passed through 
His lonely vigil and His agony and bloody sweat, 
before He was betrayed. Joseph of Arimathea 
was a rich man, and in his tomb was Jesus laid. 
It was not the fact of riches, but the evil use of 
them, and the temper they bred against which 
Jesus spoke. It was not money only, but position, 
and opportunity for joy-making, which Jesus 
thought about, and for neglect or misuse of which 
He reprobated him who cared for himself alone 
and had no pity to spare for those less fortunately 
circumstanced. He who despised Lazarus as a 
beggar man was one to whom God had given op- 
portunities for making the world nobler and 
gladder, and he misused them. His warnings are 
solemn indeed. " Woe unto you, rich men, for 
ye have received your consolation." " How hardly 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 133 

shall they that trust in riches enter into the King- 
dom of God." "It is easier for a camel to go 
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man 
to enter the kingdom of God." Whatever was 
meant by these hyperbolic statements, you and I 
know quite well how true Jesus was to human 
nature when He told us it was difficult, nay, almost 
impossible, for a man of wealth and fame and 
power to retain with these things the heart of a 
little child. 

What of the figure of Lazarus? The beggar 
man we are told little about beyond this, that he 
was poor with an abject poverty, that he was a 
sufferer, and that the disease from which he suf- 
fered was loathsome and repellent in the extreme. 
Why did Jesus paint such a picture ? Was there 
anything meritorious in poverty? Not at all. 
There is a possible Pharisee in the cottage as well 
as in the palace. There is a possible Pharisaism 
of poverty, the opposite of poverty of spirit, and 
Jesus did not speak of this. But His purpose ex- 
plains itself. In Jesus' day and among the Jewish 
people misfortune was looked upon as a sign of 
the disfavour of God, and more than once Jesus 
had to set Himself to correct that erroneous, un- 
spiritual view. " Lord, who did sin, this man or 
his parents, that he was born blind? " " Neither," 
said the Master, " but that the works of God 
might be shown forth in him." " Think not that 



i 3 4 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were 
sinners above all Galilaeans. I tell you nay, but 
except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." 
Too prone were the contemporaries of the Master 
to think of the rich man in his high place, and 
the Pharisees with their learning, and their in- 
fluence, and their arrogance, as the favourites of 
Deity, and the unfortunate ones and the sufferers 
of the earth as those for whom He has no concern, 
who perhaps were indeed the objects of His just 
displeasure. That is why the figure of Lazarus is 
introduced. 

Now take our Lord's account of the respective 
destinies of these two men. Lazarus dies and is 
carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The 
phrase " Abraham's bosom " was a well-known 
one, current among the people of Judea to express 
the bliss of the faithful Israelite who had passed to 
his reward. It is all but a synonym for heaven. 
When Jesus used the phrase " Abraham's bosom " 
He meant that in spite of the earthly appearances 
which would point to the disfavour of God, 
Lazarus had passed into the bliss of the righteous. 
" The rich man died and was buried, and in hell 
he lifted up his eyes, being in torments." The 
word used for hell in this place is ■' Hades," the 
place of departed spirits, the very place where 
Lazarus was. That is an important point which 
should not be lost sight of. Between him and 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 135 

Lazarus there was distance, but it was not so great 
but that the rich man could call to him he had 
erstwhile despised, and ask his sympathy and help. 
And yet he was in hell, in much of the sense in 
which you and I would use that word. He lifted 
up his eyes, being in torments, and called to Father 
Abraham to send him by hand of Lazarus the pity 
he himself had withholden in life. And Abraham's 
reply is, " It cannot be." What, no ministry 
from him whom God has exalted to him whom He 
has abased? Christ did not say so. But there 
are some ministries that are impossible. Righteous- 
ness may pity and serve unrighteousness, but it 
cannot identify itself with it. Between the rich 
man and the erstwhile beggar man was a great 
gulf fixed, but the gulf consisted not in where they 
were but in what they were. That is the point 
of the narrative. Abraham could enter into 
colloquy with the suffering sinner whom God was 
punishing, for the distance did not fix the gulf, it 
was character and experience that fixed it. The 
rich man and Lazarus were in the same place, but 
there was a gulf between them which neither could 
pass over. 

This teaches me two lessons which I pass on to 
you. The first is this: Heaven and hell are states 
of the soul rather than of the body, whether it be 
the spiritual or the natural body. These are ex- 



136 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

periences independent of place and time. As 
Milton has it : 

"The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' 1 

Or, as the Persian poet puts it, 

" I sent my Soul through the Invisible, 
Some letter of that after-life to spell, 

And by-and-bye my Soul return'd to me, 
And whispered, ' I myself am Heaven and Hell ; ' 

" Heaven but the vision of fulfilPd desire, 
And Hell the shadow from a Soul on fire." 

Heaven and hell may dwell in the same home, sit 
at the same table, sleep in the same bed, but be- 
tween them is a great gulf fixed. Here, for 
example, is a home in which one lad goes wrong, 
bears about with him a guilty secret he may not 
tell to the rest, and yet he must keep the dreadful 
company of his guilty self. Every time that lad 
hears the happy laughter of brothers or sisters the 
fires of hell are burning in his heart. Every time 
he receives his father's benediction or listens to 
his mother speaking of him in the language of 
maternal pride, he knows that between them and 
him there is a gulf fixed, and over it neither he 
nor they can pass. To the sinner abiding in his 
sin even the language of love is part of the torture 
of hell. 

Here is another home in which an unhappy man 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 137 

has power to afflict those who are weaker than 
himself. He has lived for wrong and vicious 
ideals all his life, and they have grown stronger 
as he has grown older. He has power to oppress 
and crush one faithful, noble woman, whose very 
presence and whose purity of character are a re- 
buke to him. The more nobly she lives, the better 
for him she cares, the fiercer seems to burn his 
anger, because he knows he is not worthy of such 
devotion. He does not repent, but he suffers re- 
morse, and between the two there is a great gulf 
fixed. The fires of hell are burning in that man's 
experience now, for guilt is often made more 
devilish by the presence of holiness. 

And in our acquaintance with life have we never 
suspected that the fires are burning where the 
world sees not? There are people facing life to- 
day with a smile who are not to be counted heroes, 
merely because behind the smile is pain. Some 
people can smile, as it were, in the shadow of the 
cross, and they do well. They are God's great 
ones. But there are others who wear the smile 
of dreadful joy, the smile of sin's make-believe. 
Down beneath are the fires of hell, kindled by the 
pollution and the corruption and the wickedness 
on which the soul has fed. We can meet with 
hell in the palace, in the business house, in the 
cottage home, and salute it and pass it by, and 
never know, but hell knows, for it has seen heaven. 



138 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

Oh, someone will say, wait a little, you have 
overstated your case. Some of the worst men are 
the happiest and the most content with life, and 
the smile of which you speak on the face of a bad 
man may be absolutely sincere. The beggar-man 
may lie unheeded at their gate and need, in vain, 
their sympathy and their helping hand. It is not 
always money the suppliant wants, he wants soul, 
and it is withheld by the man who might have 
been what now he never wants to be, a minister 
to the world's woe. And yet he is glad. What of 
him ? " And the rich man died, and was buried." 
The hand of death can strip away all delusions, 
and you and I, old men and young, no matter 
what our theology may be, or whether we have 
any at all, have to face the king of terrors some 
day. Some day our brief earthly life will be over. 
We shall be in the hands of one who does not 
let go. What shall we discover then? "Thou 
fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee, 
and then whose shall these things be for which 
thou hast lived and hast enjoyed alone? " Naked 
and open are we to Him with Whom we have to 
do, and, believe me, nothing can avail to save us 
from what we are in the great day of revelation, 
whether it come on this side of the grave or on 
the other, when delusions are gone, and we find 
ourselves in our heaven or our hell. We may 
eat, drink, and be merry ; we may stifle the move- 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 139 

ment of the better soul within us, but some day 
it wakens and will be heard, and the wakening 
is pain. 

This reminds me that we have now arrived at 
the second lesson of which I spoke a few minutes 
ago. It is this : Hell is at its fiercest when it sees 
heaven, and not till then. Follow the rich man's 
prayer, " Father Abraham, send Lazarus." And 
it is refused, for there is a sense in which Lazarus 
can never come, as I have already shown. Love 
cannot save guilt from the fire itself has kindled, 
nay, it may increase it. " Then, Father Abraham, 
send him to my father's house, for I have five 
brethren, that he may testify unto them, lest they 
also come into this place of torment." There is 
something here I want you to see. It is that in 
the rich man — poor sufferer, rich man is the wrong 
term for him now, when everything in which he 
trusted has been burned away — in the rich man 
there is this sign of grace. There is no sugges- 
tion of finality here. When he sat, proud and 
self-sufficient, in his haughtiness within his earthly 
home, he had no thought to spare for those who 
were likely to come into such an experience as his. 
But now he has, because he had seen heaven, be- 
cause he had come face to face with things as they 
might have been. His hell burned the more 
fiercely for the vision, but he was nearer God. " If 
I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make 



i4o HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

my bed in hell, behold Thou art there." Sooner 
or later heaven and hell meet each other, that which 
might have been in our life, and that which is — 
it may be on this side of death, it may be on the 
other, but that great antithesis will come, and we 
shall be under no delusion when it does come. 
Our hell will gain in fierceness when we have seen 
the heaven that ought to be. 

One morning I went for a walk in a plot of 
ground, near to my home, which at this season 
of the year is rapidly becoming gloriously beauti- 
ful. The touch of spring is on it. On my way 
to it I observed, to my astonishment, great billowy 
clouds of smoke. I wondered what it was, but I 
soon discovered the reason. The gardener had 
been busy. The rubbish and the corruption of 
the winter had been gathered into one pretty little 
spot, one secluded corner of the ground in which I 
was accustomed to walk, and was burning. It was 
not burning well, so I took a stake from near by, 
and stirred up the mass, letting in the free, bright 
air of heaven, and then it burst into radiant flame, 
and was soon consumed. " Ah," I said to my- 
self, ''this heap of corruption in the very midst 
of sylvan and floral beauty is like hell in heaven. 
Hell burns the hotter at the touch of heaven." 

So it is in every wicked, selfish human life, on 
this side of the grave or on yonder. A man may 
not be capable of seeing now what he is, but God 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 141 

will leave him in no delusion in the great day 
when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, 
and the life becomes its own hell in the midst of 
the heaven that might have been. 

Before I sit down there is one word I should 
like to add about Abraham's answer to the rich 
man's prayer. " If they believe not Moses and 
the prophets, neither will they believe though one 
rose from the dead." It has an important bear- 
ing on our text. " If they believe not Moses and 
the prophets." Why should they believe Moses 
and the prophets? The rich man's chief concern 
now that his soul was awake was that his brothers 
might be told how certain it was that there was 
a heaven to win, a hell to shun. But the reply of 
Abraham was, "They have Moses and the pro- 
phets! If they believe not Moses and the 
prophets, neither will they believe though one rose 
from the dead." Are there some here in the posi- 
tion of the rich man and his brothers? You say 
to yourself, '* If I could only be certain that there 
was an after life at all, if I could only be sure that 
the grave did not end everything, I might order 
my life differently." Would you? That is a 
poor sort of offering to God, who is righteousness. 
" He hath showed thee, O man, what is good." 
You tell Him that you calculate chances, and that 
if you could only be sure there is an eternity, that 
there is a Christ, that there is a judgment upon 

K 



142 HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 

sin, that you would make a different thing of your 
life! O, sir, the very attitude is preparing your 
hell. All beautiful souls are God's prophets, God's 
index fingers pointing towards heaven. You have 
seen enough, and know enough, even without any 
preacher, for the living of life in purity and 
righteousness and truth. Why do you not do it? 
It is not for rewards nor for punishments that 
righteousness should be lived, but because it is 
written large within your own heart. If any makes 
that excuse to himself at this time I would com- 
mend to him the words of Mr. Gladstone, written 
to his own son in the prime of the great statesman's 
career: "Believe in life as a great and noble 
calling, not a mean and grovelling thing, to be 
suffled through as best we may, but an elevated 
and lofty destiny." 

The man who could write that had seen what 
Jesus taught through the mouth of Abraham in 
this parable. If they believe not this kind of testi- 
mony, the testimony of a Christ-like life lived 
in obedience to the things that are morally obli- 
gatory, rewards and punishments aside, it is be- 
side the mark and futile to call one from the 
dead. Brethren, as soon as we get into this 
region, and talk about high and holy living, what 
can we do without Jesus ? All the great and brave 
spirits of this age or any other age since Jesus was 
preached for the first time have turned to Him 



HELL'S VISION OF HEAVEN. 143 

when they thought of God and truth. They can- 
not ignore Jesus. " Everyone that hath heard of 
the Father and hath learned cometh unto Me." 

"Alone, O Love ineffable, Thy saving Name is 
given, 
To turn aside from Thee is Hell, to walk 
with Thee is Heaven." 



THE NEW BIRTH. 



"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom 
of God."— St John Hi 3. 



IX. 

THE NEW BIRTH. 

THIS is one of the most familiar texts in the 
whole range of Scripture, and yet I believe 
this is the first time I have ever read this chapter, 
much less spoken from this text, in the City 
Temple : why, I hardly know ; probably chiefly 
because of the conventional ideas that have 
clustered about this most beautiful spiritual 
principle and obscured it. And yet the text is one 
of such wondrous significance, and is so precious 
a spiritual experience, that it is impossible alto- 
gether to ignore it, whether it is preached from or 
not. It is presumed in every sermon in which 
Christ is really exalted, and it is the root principle 
of all true spiritual life. " Except a man be born 
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Yet 
it is remarkable that it seems somewhat of an ex- 
ception in our Lord's teaching. This is the only 
place in the New Testament where it is referred 
to in these terms, and it seems as though this was 
the only occasion on which our Lord ever em- 



148 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ployed any such words. Indeed, it has been 
questioned whether these are His words at all. He 
speaks them here in private, and to one man only, 
and if ever they were made public in the form in 
which they were spoken, it must have been because 
this man told it. 

What could our Lord really have meant? The 
verse as it stands has become associated with 
certain religious ideas which are familiar to us all. 
The text as it came from the lips of the Master has 
a certain freshness which I will dare to say not 
any of us has adequately understood. " Except a 
man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
God." More literally, " Except a man be born 
anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." And 
better still, " Except a man be quickened from 
above he cannot see the kingdom of God." This, 
I say, is the root principle of all true spiritual 
experience. Why did not Jesus state it openly? 
It seems to be here a kind of esoteric teaching. 
One man, and that not a man of His most familiar 
circle, heard Him say it, and one gospel, and one 
gospel only, enshrined it. Matthew, Mark, and 
Luke have nothing like it. 

Wait a moment. Matthew and Mark and Luke 
affirm it in as plain terms as St. John. And Jesus 
had this principle upon His lips every time he 
stood up to speak about the kingdom of God. This 
was the burden of His teaching, this was the mar- 



THE NEW BIRTH. 149 

row of His message; when He stood upon the 
hillsides of Galilee and addressed the simple folk 
who heard Him gladly, this principle was what He 
had to speak about and to declare. " Blessed are 
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." " Blessed are the pure in heart : for they 
shall see God." Here is the same principle set 
forth in these immortal paradoxes which shall 
live as long as a spiritual man is to be found in 
the world. Jesus is saying here substantially the 
same thing as He said to Nicodemus. The poor 
in spirit, the pure in heart, those who know their 
needs and are single in their desires, have the 
kingdom of God, know the love of the Father, 
have seen, have entered in. They have been born 
from above, and except a man be quickened so, 
he cannot see the kingdom of God. 

And yet this principle has, like all other fructive 
ideas, been hardened and literalised in the course 
of its history until sometimes it has been twisted 
out of all recognition. I was reading but a few 
days ago a letter addressed by Cardinal Manning 
to Dr. Pusey, and in the course of it that eminent 
man makes a remark of this kind. He said, Once 
a^ child has been baptized in the name of the 
F^her and the Son and the Holy Ghost, whether 
by a member of the Roman communion or not, I 
thank God he is a member of the church of Christ. 
He has received supernatural grace in the sacra- 



150 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ment of baptism, and he is therefore a member of 
Christ and of His body, the Church. If, he con- 
tinued, that child commits no mortal sin from 
childhood to old age, he will assuredly be saved 
because of this sacramental act, the condition of a 
spiritual regeneration. Now I have a reverence 
for the memory of Dr. Manning, but I confess I 
could not understand, and shall never under- 
stand, how a man of the intellectual eminence 
of the Cardinal could really believe that this 
is the true explanation of this beautiful principle 
which our Lord declares in the third of John. 
It is all true, no doubt, that to bring a child 
within the sphere of the fold of Christ gives 
him a great chance of growing up in it, a chance 
of becoming a member of His body, the Church, 
and entering into the kingdom of God. I praise 
God, like Cardinal Manning, for all those who 
have been brought to God's altar in the arms of 
loving parents, but to think that any mere external 
rite can ever bring a man to God or the absence 
of it keep him away from Him, is to me a most 
extraordinary supposition, the most astonishing 
distortion of this text that could have been possible 
in the history of Christendom. 

Oh, brethren, if this had been its meaning, the 
surprise of Jesus that Nicodemus did not under- 
stand would have been altogether unreasonable. 
Why was it that Nicodemus did not at once under- 



THE NEW BIRTH. 151 

stand? Why was it that his eyes were holden 
that he could not see, his ears were stopped that 
he could not hear ? Not because the principle was 
new. It was new in its present form, but it had 
always been true of any man who had turned 
Godward and forsaken the evil past and received 
a new breath of the divine Spirit from above, and 
Nicodemus ought to have known it. 

In Christian history even we Evangelicals have 
limited this wonderful fact. We have associated 
it with certain forms of decision for Christ. We 
have supposed we have attained it when we have 
got somebody to say something about his belief 
in certain Evangelical facts. We have been prone 
to associate the principle with the form or forms 
in which it has been enshrined age after age. Great 
waves of spiritual power have swept over the 
church in all the centuries of its existence, and at 
intervals in its history. A Francis of Assisi 
gathers three thousand people round him in the 
plains of Lombardy to listen to his message of the 
love of God. A John Wesley rouses all England 
and beyond it, and to-day his followers number 
thirty millions, who have been drawn by the same 
gospel and have made the same decision as their 
master. A D. L. Moody came when England was 
at a low spiritual ebb indeed, and from shore to 
shore he aroused this land with the story of the 
love of God in Jesus Christ. But imagine, if you 



152 THE NEW BIRTH 

could have Francis and Wesley and Moody to- 
gether, how strange would be their attitude to one 
another, how completely surprised at the utterance 
of what they thought non-essential, or even erro- 
neous, in the teaching of the others — a Francis 
deferential to the Pope, a Moody who would have 
shrunk at the sound of his name — how can it be 
that all these produced the same results with their 
message, and drew men with the glow of en- 
thusiasm and child-like faith into the kingdom? 
I will tell you. It is because something has lain 
beneath all the forms in which this principle has 
been presented to the world, a something that 
Nicodemus and Cardinal Manning and John 
Wesley and D. L. Moody all knew. It is not 
the form, but the fact, that matters, and I will tell 
you the fact. It is that in every man there is a 
latent Christ. The touch of the Divine Spirit 
wakens that Christ within and brings Him into 
union with the Christ above. As Origen so 
sweetly put it centuries ago, " Christ sleeps in the 
soul of every man as He slept in the boat on the 
Lake of Galilee, and He wakes at the cry of peni- 
tence to still the storm of sinful passion in our 
lives." 

I said just now "a latent Christ. " Will you 
permit me a very homely figure to illustrate what 
I mean ? Two or three days ago, laid aside for 
the moment by temporary indisposition, I watched 



THE NEW BIRTH. 153 

from the window of my bedroom the swaying of 
the branches of some apple trees in the wintry 
blast. I could remember so well when those same 
apple trees had almost obscured the view from 
the window by their very luxuriance of summer 
beauty, now bare and dead, with no suggestion of 
the spring-time about them. One looked with 
something of regret for a departed glory. Then 
I remembered that inside everyone of those gnarled 
branches, beneath the seeming deadness, all the 
foliage, the blossoms, the fruit of the spring and 
summer days are latent now. The warmth and 
brightness of a day to be will call them forth, but 
it could not call them forth if they were already 
dead. There is no man in this congregation, how- 
ever sunken in sin or however hardened, coarse, 
foul, unspiritual in his attitude and desire, but 
there is, though you may never suspect it, within 
him the image of the Christ that is to be. 

This is the great truth that underlies our text. 
Except such a man be quickened from above he 
cannot see the kingdom of God. But if he sees, 
if he knows, if the heart be flung open like the 
poor in spirit, the very fact that he knows of his 
need, the very fact that his desire is single, brings 
him God, lifts him into the spiritual kingdom and 
the sunshine of the Father's glory. Here is the 
principle on which all true spiritual experience is 
based. 



154 THE NEW BIRTH. 

We know what it is, do we not, even in ordinary 
human life, to have our attitude toward the world 
and men and things completely changed? There 
are not a few here who have passed through such 
experiences, and they mean more than you can 
readily say. Here is a young lover, perhaps, 
whose whole attitude to life and its problems has 
been changed because a good woman has come 
into his heart. Let no one smile at such a change 
of outlook, for it means a radical change of char- 
acter too, if that man be a man indeed. The 
world is a bigger place to him, and he is a bigger 
man. And what is more, his kinship to the great 
heart of humanity is purer, nobler than it was 
before. Because a great love has entered his life 
it seems as if that man's whole being has been 
stirred and his soul has been awakened, he has 
entered into a new world. 

It is only a figure, but it comes very near to 
what the Master means by the principle here. So 
is it with every young mother. Do you remember 
the hour when you looked for the first time upon 
the face of your babe? No one can describe to 
you, and no one who has not passed through the 
experience can understand as well as you, just how 
you felt, not only to that tiny morsel of humanity, 
but to all the world that contained it, after you had 
been born anew into an experience you had never 
known before, And yet young lover and young 



THE NEW BIRTH. 155 

mother both were lover and mother potentially 
before the great experience was born. You are 
what you are, and you know what you know, and 
you see what you see, because you were capable 
of being quickened into it. So it is with this great 
experience of the kingdom of God. Every man 
who is quickened from above can enter in, but 
he cannot see it till the quickening touch has come. 
Yet a quickening touch can wake him and stir 
his soul into a longing for God, proof that God 
was there before. 

I want every man in this church to-night to 
realise that, and never let go the thought that you 
are made for God, and without God you shall never 
attain to what you are meant to be. Dimly you 
have glimpses occasionally of what it might be to 
enter that promised land where the redeemed walk 
with those who have been chosen of God like 
them. There is no barrier to warn you from it. 
You can enter in if you will. Blessed are the poor 
in spirit, blessed are the pure in heart — theirs is 
the kingdom, they shall see. It is a surrender of 
heart and life to what you know to be the touch 
of heaven, the hand of the Master divine. It may 
come to you in any one of a thousand ways. I 
would place no restriction upon the experience of 
any man, or try to force it into a mould of mine, 
for I know God can declare Himself in many ways 
to ordinary everyday human experience. A Crom- 



156 THE NEW BIRTH. 

well wrestling in the seventeenth century with this 
great fact, true in every age and just the same in 
every age, would not have been understood by 
many who are entering into the Kingdom through 
the doors of the Welsh revival, yet that Cromwell, 
when the throes were over and the sombre crisis 
was past, magnificent man that he was, could 
say, with the humility of a little child, " He that 
was Paul's Christ is my Christ too." John 
Bunyan, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 
with all the devils of hell, as he felt it, gathered 
about him to drag his soul to perdition, was long 
in seeing the morning light, but it came, and when 
it came it made just such a character as Evan 
Roberts of to-day, and in many churches of this 
land prayers are going up this night that God will 
pour out upon England of that Spirit which in ages 
past has quickened men into the kingdom of God. 
Prayer will be answered, never fear, but let no man 
suppose he can dictate to God just how it will be 
answered. It is not the revival meeting merely 
that will effect what is sought. Some men will 
come in solitariness, with no companion and no 
guide but the heavenly Father Himself, and some 
will come with the enthusiasm and the magnetism 
of the multitude to help them, but they come, if 
so be that they have opened heart and mind and 
will to the inflow of the Spirit of God. My ex- 
perience is not that of the revival meeting. I can- 



THE NEW BIRTH. 157 

not remember the hour when I could say that I 
had passed from death unto life, but " I know 
Whom I have believed." There was no earthly 
shock, there was no explosion of desire and con- 
viction; but it was like a flower opening to the 
sun. All the same, it was quickening from above. 
And so it has been wherever any man has been 
born into the kingdom of God, sudden or slow, 
but as certainly the touch of the divine, be it a 
Cromwell, a Bunyan, a Spurgeon, a Moody, a 
Roberts, or one of those quiet souls who in a 
solitary corner give themselves and all they hope 
to be into the keeping of the Redeemer of man- 
kind. 

This introduces me to the illustration for the 
sake of which I preach this sermon, and I want you 
to listen to it with patience and sympathy. Some- 
one wrote to me in the past week to say that some 
had come, through the teaching from this pulpit, 
to take a new view of Christ, my Lord, not that 
they had come to take my view, but they had come 
to take my attitude. The writer said, incredible 
as it may seem to you, that although they had a 
truly religious nature and a strong desire to know 
the truth concerning God the Father and His un- 
failing love, yet the spectacle of the woe of the 
world, the complexity of the problem of human 
depravity, and the consideration of the experience 
of human suffering from day to day, from year 

L 



158 THE NEW BIRTH. 

to year, from age to age, the horror and the 
mourning of history, held them back — they could 
not see the Father's face, and even the Christ 
they regarded with a half-contemptuous feeling. 
Here in the church they learned to feel that that 
dim, distant, seemingly pusillanimous character 
was living, perhaps reigning, and whether reigning 
or no, worthy to reign. They found that some 
people loved Him, that some people trusted Him, 
that some people were living in the power of His 
might, and this has brought them, as it were, into 
a new region of experience; and still they do not 
know what to think about the claims of that Christ, 
beyond this, He is the best that human eyes ever 
saw, He belongs to humanity, He is as the very 
soul of it, He is enshrined in its heart, Jesus, our 
Master, our Leader, our King. Mark, do not read 
too much into that. They could not say for 
certain whether Christ uttered the words of my 
text or no. They are standing on the borderland 
of a new experience, and looking in, but they have 
seen something. They have seen the Christ that 
was worthy to be enthroned, they have seen that 
that Christ, if only by the infection of His per- 
sonality, has been transforming the life and the 
experience of human kind for nineteen centuries. 
That is what they have seen. What am I to call 
it? This means a new attitude toward life itself. 
This means a new and wistful gaze toward heaven. 



THE NEW BIRTH. 159 

They have seen because they have been quickened ; 
surely they are not far from the kingdom of God. 
Nay, have they not entered it? 

A friend of mine to whom I spoke about this 
experience told me, somewhat puzzled at such an 
attitude, how far different it was from his own. 
He seems to see the Christ as it were in his daily 
walk. He appeals to Him from his desk in the 
counting-house. He is just the norm, the stan- 
dard of his moral life. He is the object of his 
prayers, He is the goal of his faith. He said: 
" Oh, Christ is everything to me. Why cannot 
my Christ be everything to them?" My answer 
is to you as to him : Christ has come to you with a 
vision of which no man can rob you, and of the 
power and the reality of which you need not to 
be convinced. But the Christ has come to these 
also, like the gentle rain in the spring-time upon 
the timid flowers, bidding them open to the summer 
sun, and they are as truly quickened from heaven 
as ever you have been. 

Some will understand what I have said and 
some will not; but I leave it there. God knows for 
whom it was meant. Perhaps the man who has 
found it most difficult up to this moment to believe 
that there was a God to care for him, or a Spirit 
to quicken, or a Christ in Whom to believe, will 
realise as his heart burns within him that there 
is a Someone who talks with him by the way. 



160 THE NEW BIRTH. 

" He seems to hear a heavenly friend 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labour working to an end." 

I have the fullest sympathy with everyone who is 
doing anything for Christ to-day, in calling men to 
Him or witnessing for Him; but I care very little 
about the form in which the call is expressed. I 
care everything for the fact that there is a latent 
Christ in every man and a Divine spirit that 
quickens him into the kingdom of God. They 
tell me that some months ago a young Scotsman, 
who had been blind all his life, suddenly, by a 
marvellous operation, received his sight. They 
say that to that young man the world is another 
place. He wanders daily up and down in scenes 
with which you and I are so familiar that we do 
not even call them beautiful, and he sees a radiance 
that was hidden from ordinary everyday eyes that 
have gazed upon them all their lives. " Oh," he 
says, "the world is so beautiful! Who would 
have thought it was so beautiful ? " Apt figure of 
the experience of the man who has found his God 
through the touch of a quickening Spirit. 

" Lord, I was blind : I could not see 
In Thy marred visage any grace ; 
But now the brightness of Thy face 
In radiant vision dawns on me." 

I am unwilling to sit down while one In trie 
congregation may be feeling that what I have said 



THE NEW BIRTH. 161 

is no concern of his. It has everything to do with 
you. It is not the number of facts you know, 
the number of propositions you can declare, the 
evangelical facts of which you have made yourself 
master — it is not that; it is to believe, to realise, 
that your whole nature was meant to be the taber- 
nacle of the holy God, that already within you is 
the capacity for the divine, that the Christ only 
waits to respond to the call of penitence: " Lord, 
I believe; help thou mine unbelief." 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD, 



"Almost all things are by the law purged with blood ; and 
without shedding of blood is no remission." — Hebrews ix. 22. 



X. 

THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

THE second part of our text is often quoted with- 
out the first, and on that account perhaps is 
the more familiar to the ordinary student of Scrip- 
ture. But the two ought never to be considered 
apart, for they are mutually dependent expressions 
of one idea. It is ours to discover what that idea 
is. First, let us be sure of our terms. May I re- 
read to you the Authorised Version of our text, 
follow it with the Revised Version, and then add 
a paraphrase in more ordinary and everyday 
English than either. The Authorised Version is 
this :— 

" Almost all things are by the law purged with 
blood, and without shedding of blood is no 
remission. " 

The Revised Version reads: — 

" According to the law, I may almost say, all 
things are cleansed with blood, and apart from 
shedding of blood there is no remission." 

We may paraphrase it thus: " According to the 



1 66 . THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

law of Moses, I may almost say, all things that 
pertain to the service of God, which is the service 
of righteousness, which is one with the service of 
man, are cleansed with blood, and apart from the 
outpouring of the blood of sacrifice sin cannot be 
done away." 

What is it the writer seeks to convey ? Turn to 
verses 13 and 14, and you will see. Again I quote 
from the Revised Version : — 

" If the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes 
of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, 
sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh, how much 
more shall the blood of Christ, Who through the 
eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto 
God, cleanse your consciences from dead works to 
serve the living God? " 

Observe, there is no suggestion of a victim 
offered to change the attitude of God to the wor- 
shippers ; the victim is offered, as it were, to cleanse 
their consciences from dead works to serve the 
living God. Remember that the writer is speaking 
to Hebrews, and employs terms with which they 
were familiar. He evidently wishes to establish a 
parallel between the sacrifice of Christ and that to 
which Hebrews were accustomed under the Mosaic 
dispensation. What was the meaning of the 
Mosaic system of sacrifice? Possibly some of you 
have quite an incorrect notion as to what it really 
was. You may suppose that an innocent victim 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 167 

was selected — bull, goat, or heifer — slain and 
offered in sacrifice upon the altar in order to pro- 
pitiate the Divine Being for the sins of the people, 
one and all. In this you would be mistaken ; there 
is no suggestion in this Scripture of anything of 
the kind. Turn again to verse 19 in this same 
chapter : — 

" When every commandment had been spoken 
by Moses unto all the people according to the law, 
he took the blood of the calves and the goats, with 
water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled 
both the book itself and all the people, saying : 
This is the blood of the covenant which God com- 
manded to you- ward.' ' 

But in chapter x. 4 we read thus: — 
"It is impossible that the blood of bulls and 
goats should take away sins. Wherefore when He 
(that is, Christ) cometh into the world, He saith : 
Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a 
body didst thou prepare for me; in whole burnt 
offering and sacrifices for sin thou hadst no 
pleasure : then said I, Lo, I am come (in the roll 
of the book it is written of me) to do Thy will, O 
God." 

In verse 15 of the same chapter we also read: — 

" The Holy Ghost also beareth witness to us, 

for after He hath said, This is the covenant that I 

will make with them. After those days, said the 

Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts, and upon 



1 68 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

their minds also will I write them; and their sins 
and their iniquities will I remember no more.'* 

The truth is we have here no suggestion of a 
substitutionary victim; what we have instead is a 
symbolic rite; it is similar to what we observe in 
the Lord's Supper, setting forth something that is 
too great for language. The people of Israel did 
not receive a victim from God to be punished 
instead of them ; the animal they slew they gave to 
God. It was as though by this symbol they 
offered themselves; they attached no significance 
to the offering of the animal, beyond what it 
reminded them of. It was as though they were 
saying : This is Israel, this is our blood that we are 
shedding; just as the blood of the body of an 
animal is shed, so Israel in its conflict with sin, in 
its struggle for righteousness, which is the service 
of God, is shedding the blood of the soul. I can 
find no other term to express what is here meant ; 
it is a scriptural term, too: " He poured out his 
soul unto death." The nation was as one in this 
sacrifice; individual responsibility for sin had 
hardly arisen in the national consciousness; this 
was a collective act; the high priest acted for all 
the people, and it was not the death of the animal 
that made any difference whatever ; it was the atti- 
tude of the people towards the great fact whether 
they were serving sin or serving righteousness. 
Just as the animal poured out his blood so they 
were to resist unto blood, striving against sin. 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 169 

Now, concerning the sacrifice of Christ, may we 
not equally be mistaken sometimes and cherish 
false ideas, as we may about the Mosaic economy ? 
There are at least two false ideas current amongst 
us to-day concerning the sacrifice of Jesus Christ — 
first, that except Christ had suffered and died, God 
the Father would have reprobated and destroyed 
all human kind, but He has been pacified by the 
shedding of the sacred blood of an innocent victim. 
" All have sinned and come short of the glory of 
God." He must punish someone, so He punished 
the Lord Jesus, a willing victim. I need not say 
that this view is both unscriptural and untrue. 
God does not need to change His attitude to men ; 
no sacrifice has ever been offered that effected such 
a change; the death of Christ makes no difference 
in the purpose of the Father in the redemption of 
the race. It would be immoral if it could, and 
God would be doing wrong. None can be 
punished but the guilty. Saviourhood suffers with 
the sinner that it may save him ; it is never 
punished for him. The second false idea is this: 
that the shedding of the blood of Christ will some- 
how — no one has ever been able to say how — free 
a sinner from the consequences of his guilt if he 
accept by faith the proffered grace. The New 
Testament nowhere says so; the evangelical truth 
strikes much deeper. The facts of life are against 
such a belief as I have described, and so is the 



i7o THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

moral sense of humanity. And yet there is a sense 
in which the suffering of Christ for sin, and all 
suffering for righteousness' sake, does do away 
with the consequences of sin, but not until the sin 
itself is gone. There is thus a truth in substitu- 
tion — a truth in which you and I may be called 
to share — and we must try to see what it is. These 
two false ideas find no support in the Gospel of 
Christ, nor in the teaching of our Lord nor of His 
apostles. Let us see where the truth is really to 
be found. 

A few days ago in a Midland town a murderer 
paid the penalty of his crime. He had slain in a 
foul and callous fashion a poor little child. In the 
dock, when he was sentenced, the unrepentant 
savage cursed the judge and jury and the parents 
of the little one he had killed. But on the day 
before his execution he penned a letter to the 
bereaved parents asking for their forgiveness, say- 
ing that he repented of his deed, that he was going 
to be with Jesus, and he trusted to meet them in 
heaven. Well, I cannot but feel that if it were 
true that this murderer takes his place forthwith 
by the side of Stephen and Paul and the martyrs of 
the New Testament and the saints of Christian his- 
tory, somehow less than justice would be done in 
the economy of God. This man has rather 
repented of the consequences than of the sin. He 
never dreamed of being able to avoid the first con- 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 171 

sequence, his own death — a life for a life — but he 
feared that there might be more upon the other side 
of the veil, maybe ; and do you suppose it possible 
that a man who has gone out of this world stained 
with the blood of a fellow creature, and capable of 
such a deed as this man had performed, will to- 
morrow change his nature so rapidly and com- 
pletely that he shall be of the blood-washed throng 
around the throne? Because I do not, and I find 
no support for such a supposition in this Gospel. 
The mere claim upon the merits of someone other 
than myself will never save me, and never was 
meant to save me, from the consequences of my 
own guilt. Being capable of the sin, I am guilty 
of it till I am incapable of it, and that spells suffer- 
ing until the change is wrought. There are men 
here, perhaps, who have made shipwreck of their 
career; wine and women have ruined thousands in 
this fair England of ours, and the tale of victims is 
not yet told. Do I address one such? Sir, you 
have repented in sackcloth and ashes, I know. 
What woke you to a proper perception of what 
you are? Was it that the world went well with 
you? Not so, but that the finger of God was 
heavy upon you. You have reaped as you have 
sown. In your body, in your circumstances, in 
your destiny, is the verdict upon your sin written 
large. You know that repentance has not given 
you back that which you forfeited nor put back 



172 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

and told over again the history of your wasted 
years. We feel, do we not, every one of us, to 
the depths of our heart, that this is not only true 
of one man here and another there, but of all men 
and of every sin ? Am I addressing the victim of 
such a man — one who has loved not wisely, but 
too well ? Time has been when you drank of the 
sweets of life, like the careless butterfly fluttering 
from flower to flower ; but you have discovered to- 
day, you sad-hearted Magdalen of the twentieth 
century, that moral weakness is punished as cer- 
tainly and severely as moral depravity ever is. We 
can make no excuse to God for what we are by 
saying that another has wrought us ill or been our 
tempter. God will strike down the tempter — 
4 ' Vengeance is mine; I will repay" — but every- 
one of us is impregnable within the citadel of our 
own being till we ourselves open the door. Verily, 
our God is a God who, because of His very mercy 
and love, will by no means clear the guilty. 

Again, may it be true that I address some who 
dread to repent of their yesterday because of what 
they must do to-morrow as a consequence of their 
very penitence? Do you ever dream that repent- 
ance will spare you ? If you told a lie years ago 
that ruined another life, that lie must be atoned for 
to-morrow, though it never can be atoned for in 
its fulness — no wrong ever is — by the truth which 
you must tell. Your heart has to be laid bare; 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 173 

you must be honest with the man you wronged 
as you have been honest with God — shall I say, as 
you would have to be honest with God if you dared 
to repent? But why is it you do not dare? 
Because you know you lay your sins upon no 
scapegoat, you can avoid none of the consequences 
of your own ill. You are marching straight 
through a gateway that leads to the outpoured 
blood and the altar of fire, when you turn with 
penitent heart to God. Penitential peace and peni- 
tential pain meet in penitential shedding of blood. 
Thus, brethren, the two ideas which I have 
characterised as false ring false, do they not, to 
human experience ? God is not changed by the 
offering of a scapegoat ; man cannot escape the con- 
sequences of his wrong by piling them upon 
another; and if in this life men are visited with 
the retribution which is the just sequence of their 
wrong-doing, think you it is all over and done with 
when the gate of death has closed upon the retreat- 
ing soul? I trow not. What, then, is the truth? 
Here it is — I cannot put it better than it is phrased 
in the words of my text : — According to the law, I 
may almost say, all things that pertain to the 
service of God, the service of truth, the service of 
right, must be cleansed with blood ; and apart from 
the outpouring of blood, the blood of the soul, sin 
is never done away. It is the old, old law that lies 
at the root of all moral endeavour ; you have made 

M 



174 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

acquaintance with it already, though perhaps no 
preacher has ever stated it before to you. In 
human history the saviours and the penitents, the 
innocent and the guilty, all alike must shed their 
soul's blood for the doing away of sin. The suffer- 
ing of the saviours of the world is redemptive, the 
suffering of the sinners is penal and purgative, but 
their purpose is one in the economy of God. It is 
the saviours who always suffer first ; sinners begin 
to suffer in the shadow of saviourhood. Every 
martyr dies for the race, every hero fights for the 
race, every saint suffers for the race, and without 
the outpouring of blood there is no remission. A 
Carlyle, for example, or a Ruskin writes a book, 
into which he puts his very soul; what does the 
prophet write for? Is it for money? If so, Car- 
lyle had died a richer man, and Ruskin had not 
made such haste to get rid of a fortune. No, these 
men are not producing for a market, they are giving 
themselves for the world; it is their life's blood, 
their deeper self, in these heroes and saints and 
seers of the race that goes to the making of good. 
A G. F. Watts paints a picture which is a message 
of the Eternal to his time; why does he paint it? 
Is it that it may sell ? It may never be sold, yet 
the message is delivered, and the prophet has dis- 
charged his task, and the burden of his commission 
is given back to God; he has put himself into his 
picture, given himself for the life of the world. 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 175 

Thus it has been since the world began. Before 
there was a Cross of Calvary set up men were 
pouring out their blood for the life of the race — the 
old, old law that without shedding of blood is no 
loosening of the fetters from the souls of men. 

But what then are we to say about Jesus? 
Just this. I would put Jesus in no second place. 
We cannot speak of Jesus as hero, saint, or 
martyr; these terms will not fit Him; He is too 
great for them, too utterly unique. He stands in 
a relationship to the race which no hero, saint, or 
martyr has ever sustained. Jesus is no hero, saint, 
or martyr, but He is the maker, the fountain, and 
the focus of heroism, saintship, and martyrdom 
throughout all time. Jesus was stretched upon the 
Cross of Calvary and died there, and the simple 
fact that there ever was a Cross of Calvary means 
that the oblation of Christ has become the norm 
and the standard for the victory of right over 
wrong, of love over hatred, of good over evil, of 
joy over pain. It must needs be that the Christ 
must suffer, and that He enter into His glory. 
Take away the Cross of Christ from the history of 
the world, and what have you left? Not much 
which we can see to be worthy of the service due 
from humanity to God. In Hebrews xi., the 
chapter next but one to that from which our text 
is taken, I have an illustration ready to hand. Here 



v 



176 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

is one who ere Christ was born was crucified with 
Christ : — 

" By faith Moses, when he was come to years, 
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; 
choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people 
of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a 
season ; esteeming the reproach of Christ (remark- 
able phrase), greater riches than the treasures in 
Egypt, for he had respect unto the recompense of 
the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fear- 
ing the wrath of the king, for he endured, as 
seeing him who is invisible." 

Moses is the very law-giver instanced and named 
in Chapter ix. as the representative of God in the 
sprinkling of the people with the covenant blood. 
I wonder how many of the people of Israel, on the 
first day when Moses came forth from the holy 
place bearing in his hands the blood of the slain 
victim, and sprinkled the vessels of the temple and 
the congregation therewith, thought of Moses him- , 
self as a victim offered for them to righteousness, 
to God. Moses was a truer victim than the blood 
of the goat, or the heifer, or the bull; for Moses 
might have done other with his life than he did. 
It was laid upon the altar of Christ before ever he 
heard of a Christ ; and, what is more, it was Christ 
who in His servant poured out His soul unto 
dea h. The things of God were cleansed with 
blood, with the soul blood of a righteous man, and 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 177 

without the shedding of blood in the deepest sense 
of that word — not of the body, but of the soul — 
there had been no Israel, it would have perished in 
slavery and sin. 

And in the Christian centuries can we see any- 
thing like unto this illustration of the sacrifice of 
Christ? You are all familiar with the Byronic 
phrase, " butchered to make a Roman holiday.' ' 
There was a time when your forefathers fought 
with each other in the arena of the Coliseum at 
Rome simply that emperor and populace might be 
pleased with the shedding of their blood ; until one 
day, one notable day in the history of mankind, a 
simple monk leaped into the arena of death bearing 
in his hand an uplifted cross, and bade them stay ; 
and the infuriated onlookers cried to the gladiators 
to cut him down. He fell, but there were no more 
gladiatorial combats in that arena at Rome. The 
blood of Telemachus had sanctified the spot, the 
Cross of Christ had conquered ; in that a man had 
laid down his life, Christ had poured out His blood 
again. I am using here no fancy phrase when I 
say Christ laid down His life again. This is 
Christ: wherever humanity struggles against sin, 
wherever saviourhood lays itself upon the altar of 
sacrifice, there is Christ dying for His own. Nor 
does it always follow that the blood of the body 
has to be shed. If so, some of us would be poor 
witnesses for Christ, for we shall never be asked 



178 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

to shed ours. But let us take our stand beside a 
John Hampden refusing to pay ship money to a 
Stuart king, or a John Wesley preaching on his 
father's tomb, and I think you will admit with 
me, however little either of these men may have 
seen of the issues, that they were righting the battle 
of God. The Christ in them shed His blood once 
more for the doing away of the wrongs of the 
world. And across the seas, in that new country 
of America, to which so many of us have turned 
our eyes in hope and confidence, the same great 
principle was lived out but yesterday in the person 
of a man who forced open the gate through which 
the slaves of the South trooped to freedom. When 
John Brown, going to execution, said, with words 
of sorrow, " Blood must be shed for the sins of this 
nation,' ' he knew himself but to be the advance 
guard of the national offering that was to be made. 
How true those words came thousands in America 
can bear witness to-day. The armies of the North 
marched to victory in the war of emanicipation 
singing as their battle song : — 

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, 
But his soul is marching on." 

Without shedding of blood there is no victory 
over wrong ; without shedding of blood there is no 
doing away of guilt. Saviour and penitent alike, 
guilty nation or guilty individual, Christ or sinner, 
we are identical in this : the blood has to be shed or 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 179 

the sin remains. The battle of righteousness is not 
fought with rose water. Spiritual manhood is 
born in the furnace. " Without shedding of blood 
is no remission." 

Suppose I address some, as I doubtless do, who 
have never thought of my text in this light before ; 
would it help you if I were to remind you that in 
the thought of God both Saviour and penitent here 
may be shedding the cleansing blood, and there- 
fore Christ is offering Himself again? Here is a 
mother who waits at the prison door for her boy 
who has been enduring the penalty of his own 
wrong-doing. The world jeers at the sound of 
his name ; he expects neither pity nor pardon from 
society — but the mother, what of her ? The culprit 
is suffering no more than she, they are one; her 
life is willingly laid down for him, and, in so 
doing, if there be aught of promise in him, any 
dawning of new manhood say, his soul, too, will 
be born again. The world may never know, but 
there is One Who must know, and that is Christ; 
for, in the redemptive sorrow of the mother and 
the penitential sorrow of the boy, Christ is present 
and endures. " Without shedding of blood is no 
remission. " 

St. Paul speaks of penitential sorrow as dying 
with Christ. Dying with Christ may be a terribly 
painful thing for the man with a black record, but 
to die with Christ is to rise with Christ. Without 



180 THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 

shedding of blood sin cannot be done away. We 
shall gather around the Lord's table presently, 
most of us I trust: will you hear in the Master's 
voice a newer ring and a newer significance if I 
say that in this symbolic act Christ is present, not 
in the elements, but in your heart and your experi- 
ence ? Christ is no more in the bread and the wine 
than there was redemptive value in the slain victim 
held in the hands of Moses, but there (in your 
hearts) is the presence of Christ. Some of you are 
going out to-day or to-morrow to some stern 
discipline which you might avoid if you would, 
but your deeper self, your nobler manhood and 
womanhood, says, " No; God wills this act of moral 
heroism, God has assigned it to me, and I will not 
shrink." Once again, therefore, CHrist's body is 
broken, Christ's blood is shed. Such pains as 
yours are the salvation of the world. In you, and 
such as you, the blood of Christ is being shed to 
cleanse mankind from all sin. 

Listen to the voice Divine once more, you who 
are penitents. You men who are here in shadow 
and in shame because of the remembrance of your 
deeds of yesterday, are you sorry ? Would you 
gladly suffer that the unsullied innocence of youth 
might come again ? Then it is a godly sorrow 
thatworketh repentance. Think what that ushers 
you into. You are uplifted, accepted in the pas- 
sion of Christ; it is Jesus who has laid the stripes 



THE CLEANSING BLOOD. 181 

upon you; your suffering is purgative, as the 
suffering of all saviours is redemptive; and the 
Christ so identifies Himself with you and me and 
all mankind that it is as though He were laid upon 
the altar with you. All human agony and contri- 
tion and shame, all love, compassion, and sacrifice, 
this, this is the cleansing blood ; this is shed for the 
life of the world. It is the Christ in every man 
that makes him sorrow for sin ; it is the Christ in 
any man that turns him into a saviour. And thus 
it is that Jesus said, as He saw the Cross looming 
in the distance, "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
will draw all men unto Me J* 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 



"But thou, Israel, art my servant Jacob whom I have chosen, 
the seed of Abraham my friend." — Isaiah xli, 8. 

'Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to 
our father : for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones 
to raise up children unto Abraham." — Matthew Hi. p. 



XL 
THE SEED OF ABRAHAM 

THERE is between these two passages an ascer- 
tainable relation, which, I trust, we shall 
assist each other to discover. The juxtaposi- 
tion of the two texts is no arbitrary one; each of 
these sentences illustrates a great underlying prin- 
ciple, a mode of thought suggested in the Old 
Testament and completed in the New. We might 
have chosen from both books other passages which 
would equally well have set forth the truth which 
it is mine to declare this morning, but we could 
not have chosen, I think, any fitter sentences in 
exposition of what the two speakers respectively 
mean. Before we attempt to combine them, may 
I ask your indulgence while I attempt a separate 
exegesis ? 

In the passage which we have read from the 
book of Isaiah is exhibited the greatest element in 
the Israelitish national consciousness. Apparently 
these people never forgot their vocation as the 
children of Abraham. Sometimes they attributed 



1 86 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

more importance to it, sometimes less. When the 
nation was at its best they spiritualised the ideal ; 
when it was at its worst they materialised it, but 
they never wholly ignored it. The book of Isaiah 
is one of the richest parts of the Old Testament, 
and from the first sentence to the last this idea of 
the vocation of Israel is suggested or implied 
therein. Here is a prophet speaking in a stern 
tone with the purpose of heartening the people 
who were listening to him. See how he does it. 
In the chapter which precedes the one whence our 
text is taken you remember (because it is probably 
more familiar to you than the forty-first is) what 
the opening sentences are: " Comfort ye, comfort 
ye, my people, saith your God ; speak ye comfort- 
ably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her war- 
fare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, 
because she hath received of the Lord's hand 
double for all her sins." The last verse of the 
chapter is more beautiful still: "They that wait 
upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they 
shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall 
run and not be weary, and they shall walk and 
not faint." 

These, then, form the exordium of our text. We 
see the mood in which Isaiah speaks, and the 
tenderness which is evident in his message. It is 
as though he would say to Israel: "You have 
passed through a severe testing time, but you have 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 187 

not ceased to be the people of God. Indeed, the 
testing time was permitted because you are never 
to be anything else than the chosen ones, God's 
Israel. You have Abraham for your father, and 
the covenant which God made with Abraham He 
will keep with you." " Fear thou not, for I am 
with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God. 
I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, 
I will uphold thee with the right hand of my 
righteousness." 

In the light of this Old Testament consciousness 
let us now look at the passage which we have 
chosen from the New. Isaiah and John are both 
heralds; there is at least this similarity between 
them, that they both come as the bearers of good 
tidings concerning a better day. But they are 
different in this : while Isaiah speaks with the 
gorgeous magnificence of Oriental symbolism, 
and his message is one full of comfort and tender- 
ness, the words of St. John are utterly unadorned; 
rugged and grim is the speech of this child of the 
desert. He comes less with a message of com- 
fort than with one of rebuke; and yet, like Isaiah, 
he is the herald of a glorious day. He, too, is 
standing forth with the object of heartening his 
people and preparing them for the advent of One 
greater than he. But the people are not ready for 
his message, nor for the blessing which he 
announces. And so his words to them are words 



1 88 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

of warning, especially, shall I say, to the 
Pharisees. The people and their leaders had been 
too much inclined to content themselves with 
making much of the tradition of the covenant of 
God with Abraham, and they thought compara- 
tively little of what was required from them in 
the keeping of it. " O generation of vipers! who 
hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come ? 
Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance." 
The Pharisees were conspicuous for two particular 
vices; and, let me say, in parenthesis, that Phari- 
sees were by no means in their entirety bad men. 
There were many sincere men in their ranks — pro- 
bably the majority were sincere — and yet Jesus, 
like John, had more difficulty with the Pharisees 
than with any other class in the community. For 
these reasons. First, they trusted in their own 
righteousness and despised others. Their chief sin 
was that of spiritual pride ; but another was, they 
believed in the externals of religion rather than 
in change of heart. They insisted much upon 
their lineage : here we are the chosen people, the 
descendants of Abraham — will not God keep His 
word to him? What part or lot has the race of 
mankind in this, which is a special privilege of 
Israel? John's reply to them is : " Think not to 
say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our 
father." Why should God trouble to show His 
favour to men like you, for you are morally 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 189 

different from Abraham? God is able of these 
stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 

Now that we have together got into what I may 
call the climate of our two texts — and I think we 
have discovered now what a bearing they have 
upon one another — shall we spend a little more 
time in discovering what John the Baptist means 
by saying, " God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham"? I have before now 
heard an exegesis of the following kind, and it 
is not a modern one only : " Oh, it is obvious that 
St. John meant that the hearts around him might 
be changed by his glorious message, that God 
would give to these men a heart of flesh in place of 
a heart of stone, and then they would be children 
of Abraham indeed." Well, the inference is not 
unjustifiable, but I do not think it is correct. I 
believe that St. John meant exactly and literally 
what he said : " God is able of these stones to raise 
up children unto Abraham." To believe that he 
meant it literally adds force to the warning and 
the appeal. What he meant, then, was something 
like this : It is in the power of God to breathe the 
breath of life into these rocks of the desert, that 
they should become living souls; and if so, it is 
conceivable they would be better men than you 
and worthier successors of Abraham, the friend of 
God. For who was, what was, this Abraham? 
If you turn to Hebrews xi. you will read a 

N 



190 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

Christian description of the man and his 
character: "By faith Abraham, when he was 
called to go out into a place which he should after 
receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went 
out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he 
sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange 
country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and 
Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise, 
for he looked for a city which hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God." Of this kind 
was this father of his people, this friend of God, 
Abraham. It has been questioned, I need not 
remind you, whether there ever was such a 
character in history. Good and devout Old Testa- 
ment scholars are inclined to question the his- 
toricity of Abraham, and to say (you need not 
feel alarmed at the assertion) that possibly he 
stands rather for a national idea, a focus of the 
national consciousness, and symbol of the cove- 
nant between God and Israel, than that he was 
an actual historical character. I take a 
different view; I believe that Abraham was a 
living, breathing man, just as much as the author 
of the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey " was — a living 
force. It is true, as some scholars would tell you, 
no doubt, there are other pens and other voices sug- 
gested in the 'Iliad' than those of Homer, but there 
was a Homer, or there would never have been an 
" Iliad." It is possible that Israel did make of 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 191 

Abraham a symbol of the covenant between God 
and Israel, a focus of the national consciousness, 
a grand idea, but there was a man to make the 
idea and the focus and the symbol and the con- 
sciousness possible. As I see him, here is the 
man. Cast your eye back along the line of his- 
tory till its dawning morning is reached, and you 
will see sitting in a tent by himself on the borders 
of an eastern desert one like an Arab chief of the 
present day. Compared with you, my friend, this 
Abraham, this Abram, as he then was, under- 
stood little about the meaning of life, little about 
the being of God; his was spiritual poverty, in- 
deed, compared with that of the most simple man 
or woman in this assembly. Perhaps it would 
not be altogether inapt if I were to say his 
acquaintance with his religion was derived from 
something similar to that practised by the natives 
of the Soudan at the present hour. Here is this 
Arab chief — I use the word Arab simply as an 
illustration — this Semitic nomad, sitting, think- 
ing, by himself : Is this the way to worship God ? 
Must it always be by abomination, and cruelty, 
and lust ? Is it all for greed of gain ? Is God a 
kind of devil who must be placated? Is this 
religion, is this worship, is this righteousness? 
And as he ponders he resolves : I must leave this 
society, and I will try whether I cannot live out 
what I am feeling now. Abraham saw a vision 



1 92 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

and heard a voice, and by faith he went out, not 
knowing whither he went, trusting only that the 
voice which had spoken to him in his prayers was 
one with the hand that should guide him. 
Momentous results followed that, far-off choice. 
It was the dawning of a great hour in which Israel 
was born, and with Israel the Messiah, and with 
the Messiah the Gospel under which you and I 
live our lives to-day. 

Here, then, is the Abraham of whose seed these 
Pharisees claimed to be. They had not his moral 
courage, nor his noble spirit; these were not of 
the kind who would have gone out in pursuit of a 
spiritual ideal. These were men who had 
hardened into insensibility, who by their lives 
denied the spiritual idea Abraham had bequeathed 
to them, and therefore the Baptist's remonstrance 
was apt indeed. " Think not to say, we have 
Abraham to our father." " You are not of the 
spiritual lineage of Abraham; you would never 
dare for God ; you are content with the grovelling 
things, your gaze is never lifted to the eternal. 
God could raise up another Abraham, yea, of 
these stones he could raise up children worthier 
than you." 

As an illustration of what the fiery, indomitable 
prophet of the desert meant, let me remind you of 
something, perhaps, that may have crossed your 
lips but yesterday. Looking upon the degenerate 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 193 

son of a noble sire, what was it you remarked to 
your companion? " His only recommendation is 
that he is his father's son." Any worthless pro- 
fligate who soils a noble name and brings degrada- 
tion upon the record of a noble race receives and 
deserves the reprobation of honest men. What 
you say about him is : This is no descendant of 
the noble dead ; he has no right to bear the name ; 
in the eternal justice it were better if he made way 
for another. Dr. Karl Peters, the German 
explorer, has published a book recently, which 
he calls " England and the English," in which he 
discusses us and our ways. He is appreciative 
on the whole. In one place he pokes a little fun 
at us on this wise. He says, in effect, " There are 
faddists in England who would advocate any 
theory, however wild, that would minister to the 
national sense of importance and justify the desire 
of aggrandisement. Amongst such notions is that 
of wishing to be identified with the Lost Ten 
Tribes of Israel." That is no strange idea to you, 
I suppose. The motive, says Dr. Peters, is quite 
clear. Israel was the chosen people; prove, if 
you can, that England is Israel, and you have 
proved that England is the chcsen people, and 
therefore justified in appropriating the whole 
earth ! You smile at the quaint conceit of the 
German writer, but there is something in our 
human nature that responds with avidity to illicit 



J94 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

appeals of that kind. The question whether 
England is Israel is not worth discussing, believe 
me. If you could prove it to-morrow, some John 
the Baptist might rise and tell you you are out of 
the spiritual succession altogether. This is merely 
the negative side of the question. The seed of 
Abraham in spirit and in truth are those who hear 
the word of God speaking within their own hearts 
and rise and go forth and obey. 

Hear what Jesus has to say on this theme, in 
John viii. 39. If Jesus is correctly reported by 
one who at any rate knew Him well, addressing 
the indignant Jews, He says : " I speak that which 
I have seen with My father, and ye do that which 
ye have seen with your father. They answered 
and said unto Him, Abraham is our father. Jesus 
saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children 
ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye 
seek to kill Me, a man that hath told you the 
truth, which I have heard of God: this did not 
Abraham." All the great souls of history, God's 
called ones, God's men, can be put into the cate- 
gory in which Jesus stood when He spoke those 
words. Remember, they are not always recog- 
nised as such, but they are there, and our moral 
consciousness recognises where they ought to be. 
All the rest of mankind must find a different cate- 
gory. We can classify easily the men who are 
of the quality of Abraham. Did these Pharisaic 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 195 

time-servers, these bigoted Jews, who were ques- 
tioning Jesus with the object of destroying Him, 
really think that they stood in the succession of 
him who was the friend of God? Verily they 
did, but the consciousness of humanity since has 
put them right. We know now who are of the 
lineage of Abraham. An Ambrose, in the early 
years of Christianity, a rough soldier, is chosen 
by the people who know him and his character 
to be their bishop; and now as prelate of Milan it 
is the duty of this erstwhile soldier to turn from 
the church door the blood-stained emperor who 
had been his commander. He dare not do other- 
wise, for he is serving a greater than the emperor : 
here speaks the seed of Abraham. An Anselm 
comes from the cloister to be Archbishop of 
Canterbury ; no more than Ambrose does he seek 
the office, he comes forth at the call of God. 
Reluctantly, it may be, he turns his face away 
from that which had been his spiritual home, and 
takes up the duty thrust upon him by the impor- 
tunity of a wicked king. The monarch and his 
aiders and abettors in wrong suppose that this 
weak man, this monk whose business in life is to 
pray in a cloister, can be easily handled; they 
shall rule as they please in England, now that 
meekness sits on the throne of Augustine. But 
they reckoned wrongly; the strongest man on 
earth is the spiritual man. All alone Anselm 



196 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

faced barbaric-materialistic England headed by itf 
sovereign, and vanquished it all alone. Abraham, 
Ambrose, Anselm — souls of one quality these, 
men who come out at the call of God all alone, yet 
not alone; these are the friends of God. 

But yesterday, as it were, a William Tyndale, 
a George Wishart, a John Wycliffe, a Richard 
Baxter, taking not counsel with flesh and blood, 
came forth from what was spiritually speaking the 
house of their nativity, all alone, into an unknown 
and untried world, leaving comfort and prefer- 
ment behind them ; some of them to the martyr's 
death, all of them to suffering, ignominy, and 
shame. Do they need pity ? By no means : these 
were of the seed of Abraham. And time 
would fail me to tell, as in Hebrews xi. we 
have been reminded, of others of whom the world 
is not worthy. And who knows? God knows, 
maybe, that in this church this morning there are 
some of the lineage of Abraham of whom the 
world will never hear. The rest of us, perhaps, 
in the gaze of heaven, may have to be put in 
another category — the category of those who have 
not dared for justice and right and truth. 3ut 
the seed of Abraham shine forth as the sun in the 
kingdom of their father. Listen to Jesus again. 
He is addressing a company of His own country- 
men, a crowded audience — greater, maybe, than 
this of this morning. His mother and His 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 197 

brethren seek Him at the door, and cannot come 
at Him for the press. He does not repudiate 
them, but he enlarges the family circle. " Who 
is My mother?" he says to the silent and ex- 
pectant assembly, " and who are My brethren? " 
He did not say, " She is not My mother," neither 
did He fanatically declare, " Those are not My 
brethren " ; but, looking round at the simple men 
who sat about Him, men of whom the world took 
small account, peasant fishermen of Galilee, He 
said, " Behold My mother and My brethren: for 
whosoever shall do the will of God the same is 
My brother and sister and mother." The true 
seed of Abraham are these. 

There is one more thought which before I close 
is suggested in our second text. It is this. There 
is something contained in the very phrase " these 
stones," which I think was not merely accidental. 
The prophet knew well what he meant; the 
stones are unpromising material. Yesterday I 
spent part of my time in answering a letter 
sent to me by a young man who attends 
here; it was put somewhat in this wise: "How 
can I know of a certainty that I belong to the 
Lord Christ ? " The writer wrote like a true man, 
as I doubt not he would speak like a true man. 
" I have small sympathy," he said, " with rhap- 
sodies and lip-religion, but I do wish to discover 
the right way and walk in that. I have often 



198 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

prayed that the experiences of which I read as 
taking place in Wales and at the Albert Hall, and 
in the life of the Augustines and Bunyans and 
Spurgeons of history, might have been mine ; but 
God has never spoken to me that way, and I feel 
somehow perhaps that there may be something 
wrong with me, and I know it not; how can I 
know I belong to the Lord Christ?" Through 
Him I speak to all such as he. Conversion is a 
turning from sin and a turning towards God. Get 
firmly hold of that fact. Feelings are an endow- 
ment which may or may not accompany it; but 
the man whose heart is right with holiness and 
truth, whose face is turned that way, is of the 
seed of Abraham and the friend of God, however 
little he may feel himself worthy of the call. 

I want you to look at this old Abraham again 
for a moment as we did at the beginning of the 
sermon. See him sitting, thinking, weighing 
well the question what was to be done with his 
life, and I want you to recognise, what is the very 
truth, that Abraham had far less to guide him than 
you. He heard the same voice as you, but it had 
not told the world as much then as it has told it 
since. When you take up this Old Testament 
again and read of the wonders achieved by the 
heroes of old, remember that the voice that spake 
to them spake within their own hearts, and not 
without, just as it speaks now to you. This 



THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 199 

Abraham heard a voice, and he said he would 
obey it; he could trust it; he established his 
covenant with God, and it never failed him. Was 
he right or was he wrong? Because that voice, 
that very same voice, is speaking in your heart 
to-day. How shall I know I am of the seed of 
Abraham? Is my face turned the way his was? 
How shall I know I belong to the Lord Christ? 
Here is my charter : " Whosoever shall do the will 
pf God (even seek to do it), the same is my brother 
and sister and mother." Jesus will never turn 
away from His own spiritual kindred. 

Yet there may be one more experience here to 
which I ought to speak. There is, perhaps, a 
man who, as I address the young fellow and others 
like him who could have written that letter, says : 
"Ah! yes; but I have made shipwreck of my 
career. Such as these of whom the preacher 
speaks may look back upon their life and say, * I 
have done the best I could with my manhood.' 
But I have failed; my road is strewn with the 
dust and ashes of vain regrets. A phrase in the 
text describes me well, * The stones are the rubbish 
of the desert. They only serve to accentuate its 
desolation.' Just so; I am the stones." Well, 
I want you to hear a voice that I am fond of listen- 
ing to — with deepest reverence be it spoken — one 
that spoke with authority ; and I think you will 
agree with me it has power in it still : — John via, 



200 THE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 

56 : " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, 
and he saw it, and was glad." Picture the 
astonishment of those Jews. " Thou art not yet 
fifty years old, and hast Thou seen Abraham? " 
Poor literalists ! Abraham in his lonely desert 
vigil never saw Jesus ; he had no foregleam of the 
day when Jesus should speak such words as these ; 
but what he did have was the vision by which he 
saw the Son of Righteousness arising in his own 
heart. That was Jesus' day. The Abraham 
who spent his early days in a guilty household, in 
the midst of men who never thought of the 
unworthiness of serving God by lascivious rites 
and brutal deeds, one day said to himself, " This 
life has to be left behind." So soon as he had 
seen that he had seen Jesus' day, and he rose up 
and went out to meet it. And that is just what 
you have to do. For the same voice that spake 
to Abraham is speaking to the world to-day, is 
speaking through Jesus: " Before Abraham was 
I am." Children of Abraham, friends of Jesus, 
is not that voice speaking to you even now? 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 



•'Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord 
delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and 
he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon 
Gibeon ; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon ! " — Joshua x. 12, 



XII. 
JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

THESE strange words have been a source of 
much perplexity because of the startlingly 
improbable nature of the event that they appear 
to record. The ingenuity of commentators has 
been much strained to account for the occurrence 
herein referred to, and present-day literalists are 
no less hard put to it to explain how the sun stood 
still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of 
Ajalon, without throwing the solar system out of 
gear. But, as I am perfectly convinced that the 
writer of these words would be greatly surprised 
if he were to listen to the discussions they have 
evoked, and as he never meant that they should 
be taken in the literal and impossible sense, we 
shall look together beneath them this morning, 
and try to discover what they signify. For, believe 
me, they stand for a great and beautiful thing. 

The Book of Joshua in its present form dates 
from about two or three enturies before Christ; 
that is, ages after the events it records. I say in 



204 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

its present form, because' it is a composite docu- 
ment, like most of the Old Testament books; it 
draws upon different sources, and our text happens 
to be one of these. Was there a Joshua at all? 
The book does not say that it was written by 
Joshua; it is a book about Joshua. Some Old 
Testament scholars are disposed to say, " No; the 
person of that name was altogether a mythical 
character, like Achilles or Hector, of Homeric 
legend, and that which has grown up about him 
is part of the folklore of Israel." I find it impos- 
sible to take that view ; I am just as sure that there 
was a Joshua as I am sure that the literal inter- 
pretation of my text is wrong. My study of history 
in years past has taught me this : that every 
forceful individuality who has entered into legend 
may have been greater than the legend; he never 
was less. There is always a man behind the tradi- 
tion. That kind of history which would blot out 
the personality of a William Tell or a Robin Hood 
is wrongly written. No matter how strange the 
story that clusters about the heads of the heroes, 
the heroes must have been there to give it being. 
This Joshua was undoubtedly the successor of a 
greater still. Moses was the greatest formative 
influence that Israel ever had. But the campaign 
in which Joshua was the leader of Israel was not 
the only one in which they conquered Canaan. 
That conquest took generations, not a few months 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 205 

or a few years. It may have been that Joshua, 
the leader of one section of the Israelitish tribes 
who were driving out the Canaanites before them, 
simply stands out as the most conspicuous hero in 
the long warfare. It was very much with Israel 
in the settlement of Canaan as with your fore- 
fathers in the settlement of this island. It was no 
easy matter for your forefathers to drive mine to 
the hills; it took generations to do it, and they 
never were completely expelled from this territory 
which we now share. You remember, too, that 
when the Anglo-Saxon invasion, which was fol- 
lowed by that of the Northmen, took place in this 
country, it was no great descent under one all- 
dominating leader. They came in tribes. There 
was a kingdom of the Northumbrians, whose name 
is perpetuated in a county; a kingdom of middle 
England, or Mercia; a kingdom of the North 
Saxons, now Norfolk; a kingdom of the South 
Saxons, Suffolk; a kingdom of the East Saxons, 
Essex; a kingdom of the Middle Saxons, where 
you now worship; a kingdom of Sussex; a king- 
dom of Kent; a kingdom of Wessex, which was 
presently to absorb the rest and become the king- 
dom of England. The great leader in any par- 
ticular age against the Celts of the West or North 
was called the Bretwalda. The Bretwalda led the 
men of Middlesex and Kent, as well as the men 
of Northumbria, against the common foe. Pro- 

O 



2o6 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

bably this is the way in which Israel subdued 
Canaan. Joshua was the Bretwalda of Judah, and 
Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh and Dan. 
Was this half-savage chief, as some people would 
count him, this worshipper of Jehovah, the most 
conspicuous leader in an age-long campaign which 
had more to do with the making of history than 
any similar campaign in the story of mankind? I 
think so. 

There is again a curious and instructive thing, 
true of Old Testament study ; it is this : that the 
most ancient portions of the narrative are usually 
indicated by poetic fragments. In the Book of 
Joshua, that which is probably the oldest sentence 
in the whole compilation is our text. It is the only 
fragment of poetry in the whole story. For this 
text of mine is just a couple of lines taken out of a 
book that is lost, the Book of Jasher, and is the 
work of a poet who sang his song before the other 
parts of the narrative were written. " Sun, stand 
thou still upon Gibeon " — does it not sound like 
poetry? — "and thou, moon, in the valley of 
Ajalon." Literature always begins in poetry, such 
as the Nibelungenlied, the Sagas of the Northmen, 
the song of Beowulf, and the chant of Caedmon 
among your own Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Before 
ever pen was put to paper, men were singing the 
deeds of their heroes; and here is a poet singing 
part of the folklore of Israel, and we have just two 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 207 

lines of his song. He puts into the mouth of 
Joshua a prayer to the powers of heaven to aid him 
in the great fight. "Sun, stand thou still upon 
Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon." 
The poet never intended this to be thought of as 
other than a figure; and, as I have already said, 
he would be greatly surprised if he heard of the 
discussions which have been written and spoken 
around those two lines. 

Here is an illustration of what I mean. Another 
poet uses precisely the same figure — no less a per- 
son than our own Shakespeare. In " King John," 
Act iii., Scene 1, he makes the King of France 
speak thus on the occasion of a royal marriage : — 

" This blessed day 
Ever in France shall be kept festival : 
To solemnise this day the glorious sun 
Stays in his course and plays the alchemist, 
Turning with splendour of his precious eye 
The meagre, cloddy earth to glittering gold : 
The yearly course that brings this day about 
Shall never see it but a holiday." 

Shakespeare would be surprised indeed if in the 
twenty-first century he were to learn that a book 
had been written to prove that he meant the King 
of France to say that the sun did stand still when 
a daughter of the royal house was wedded. But 
we need not suppose any such thing. You can get 
beneath the poet's figure and understand what was 
meant. Joshua had been sent for to recover a 



2o8 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

territory that had been lost to Israel. " And the 
men of Gibeon sent unto Joshua to the camp of 
Gilgal, saying, ' Slack not thy hand from thy 
servants; come up to us quickly and save us and 
help us.' " And Joshua's reply is, "Sun, stand 
thou still upon Gibeon " — may the sun of Israel 
never go down ; the victory of Israel shall never be 
turned into defeat, and Israel's God must reign 
over this new land for ever. 

And now beneath the figure can we see anything 
more of Joshua's own experience without neces- 
sarily drawing too much upon the imagination ? 
I think I see two things in this poetic fragment. 
The ancient singer makes Joshua declare : first, an 
expression of the faithful determination of a brave 
man, his assertion of moral purpose ; and, secondly, 
his appeal to Heaven to aid him in the realisation 
of that purpose. Here is the faithful determina- 
tion of a brave man. To learn what it is, try to 
see the issues as Joshua saw them on the day of 
this great struggle. It is unquestionable that the 
tribes which were being driven out before Israel 
represented a fouler standard of morality and a 
lower idea of God than that for which Joshua and 
his tribesmen stood; and, as so many times in 
history before and since, that which was baser had 
to give way to that which was higher. Do not 
read too much into this. The chosen people did 
not know God as you know Him. To them He 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 209 

was a tribal god; but it is their chief glory that 
their tribal deity was worshipped in righteousness. 
This Joshua knew, and for this Joshua stood. 
That you may realise how strongly he felt concern- 
ing it, remember the stand he took in his last years, 
when his last battle had been fought, and he came 
to say his valedictory words to Israel: "Choose 
you this day whom ye will serve. . . but as for 
me and my house, we will serve the Lord." This 
people Israel departed from the worship of Jehovah 
more than once in their history. On every such 
occasion they chose an easier but a baser faith. 
Their idolatry always meant a moral set-back, and, 
however little their worship of Jehovah may have 
meant to them in these formative days, it was a 
greater and a nobler thing than that which it drove 
out. Hence this was to Joshua, the great captain, 
a religious war. He was fighting for something 
more than a name; he was fighting for the future 
of a people; he was fighting for a great ethical 
ideal, and his whole heart and soul went into it. 
It was to him, as it were, a kind of crusade before 
crusades began, and the long conflict resembled 
closely the struggle of Christianity with Moham- 
medanism on this very ground, or the conflict with 
the Moors in Spain centuries afterwards. Joshua 
himself seems to me to bear some resemblance to 
the first Christian king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of 
Bouillon. Do you remember when Jerusalem fell 



2io JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

into the hands of the Crusaders, and the terrible 
massacre of the infidels was over, and Godfrey of 
Bouillon was enthroned as the first king of the 
Holy City, what the old warrior said as he knelt 
at the tomb of his Saviour? He refused to wear 
a crown of gold in the city where his Saviour had 
worn a crown of thorns, and his first act after the 
victory was to vow himself again in the service of 
the Son of Man. Why, you would say, he had a 
very poor idea of the Saviourhood of Christ if he 
vindicated it by the shedding of torrents of blood. 
Maybe ; but for the time being this man was doing 
as well as he knew how in the great commission 
that had been entrusted to him, and (may I say it 
and mean it ?) it was better for the world that the 
Cross conquered that day than the Crescent. So 
it was better for the world that the sword of Joshua 
cleared the land of Canaan of pollution, noisesome- 
ness, and fiendish cruelty; for, even though it 
meant the shedding of blood, this Old Testament 
hero was standing for something that was morally 
nobler than the things he displaced. This old- 
time crusader was fighting his crusade before there 
was a Cross to fight under. This Joshua of the 
Old Testament is of the same type as the Christian 
heroes of all ages. He was vowing himself in his 
prayer, " Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon," like 
Godfrey praying at the Saviour's tomb. 

And then, I said, in the second place, his prayer 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 211 

is an appeal to heaven to win the victory, not only 
for him, but for all for which Israel stood. He is 
praying to his father's God in the spirit of the 
ancient song : " Unto you that fear my name, saith 
the Lord, shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with 
healing in His wings." Now probably you and I 
are getting nearer to the spirit of this utterance 
than we were at first. We have to see the issues 
as Joshua saw them, to enter with something of the 
historic imagination into his circumstances. Now 
we agree that when he uttered his command, which 
was really a prayer, " Sun, stand thou still upon 
Gibeon," he was praying, like an enthusiast, a 
hero, for constancy, for strength, and for victory 
for himself, for his people, and for their God. You 
and I see much further than Joshua ever saw, not 
of our merits, but in however small a degree, of 
his. " Others have laboured, and ye are entered 
into their labours." We fight in a cause nobler 
than that in which he drew the sword, but we can 
do no better — or, shall I say, we can do no 
worthier? — with our destiny than he did with his. 
For every task, no matter what, a certain moral 
exaltation is needed to lift it out of the sphere of 
the worldly and the commonplace. To pray with 
earnestness, with enthusiasm : " Sun of Righteous- 
ness, Light of Jehovah, stand thou still upon 
Gibeon " — to pray thus in the midst of circum- 
stances like yours is to transform them from a con- 
flict into a crusade. 



212 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

I have mentioned more than once in this pulpit 
something of the life history of Henry Ward 
Beecher. Here is a man of the Joshua type; his 
whole life was a conflict. In early days, just as his 
ministry was beginning, he was once meditating 
with himself of what kind it was to be. He relates 
that one morning he rode out alone in that far 
Western country where his early work for Christ 
began, and came to the crossing of a stream at 
sundown, and, as his biographer tells it, repeating 
his own words, the flooding of the sky with morn- 
ing light moved him so mightily that he sat 
motionless on his saddle, regardless of time — it 
may have been minutes, it may have been hours. 
Like all great men, he had sympathy with Nature, 
and his own spiritual moods were influenced by it. 
He said he felt as if his heart was filled with such 
a realisation of the love of God in Jesus Christ as 
he had never enjoyed before. To Beecher this was 
a time of new consecration. Alone, as it were, 
under God's heaven, with the light thereof flooding 
not only his vision but his heart, he vowed him- 
self again to the service of his Saviour. Is there 
so very much difference between the vow that 
Joshua made upon Gibeon and that which Beecher 
made upon his Western prairie ? I trow that in 
essence they are one and the same. 

There is another character of the same kind,, 
whose story I have been reading but lately. If 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 213 

there is one living man for whom I have reverence, 
a reverence that I share with you, it is Dr. J. G. 
Paton, the veteran missionary to the New Hebrides. 
This old warrior, for such is he, ventured into a 
wholly savage community, undefended and alone, 
to carry with him the glad tidings of great joy. 
His mood appears to have been that of Joshua, the 
great captain, and like him he had his votive 
prayer. In the midst of his warfare it seemed for 
the time being as if a territory he had conquered 
for Christ was to be lost to him, just as Joshua 
lost his Gibeon ; and he says : — 

" In discouragement, almost in despair, one 
night, after long praying, I fell into a deep sleep 
in my cabin, and God granted me a heavenly 
dream, or vision, which greatly comforted me, 
explain it how you will. Sweetest music, praising 
God, arrested me, and came nearer and nearer. I 
gazed towards it approaching, and seemed to 
behold hosts of shining beings bursting into view. 
The brilliancy came pouring all from one centre, 
and that was ablaze with insufferable brightness. 
Blinded with excess of light, my eyes seemed yet 
to behold in fair outline the form of the glorified 
Jesus, but as I lifted them to gaze on his face the 
joy deepened into pain ; my hand rose instinctively 
to shade my eyes. I cried out with ecstasy. The 
music passed farther and farther away, and I 
started up, hearing a voice saying in marvellous 



2i 4 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

power and sweetness, ' Who art thou, O great 
mountain ? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become 
a plain. At this some will only smile, but to 
me it was a great and abiding consolation, and I 
kept repeating to myself, ' He is Lord, and they 
are all ministering spirits. If He cheers me thus 
in His own work, I take courage, I know I shall 
succeed.' " 

These two men — Henry Ward Beecher and J. 
G. Paton — are of kin to Joshua. There are some 
of them in every century. These men are all of 
the same stamp and mould. Who shall say that 
the poet-spirit is absent from any of these expres- 
sions of experience ? The grandeur that Paton 
saw in his vision was the splendour that Beecher 
saw in the morning light the splendour that 
Joshua saw upon Gibeon. And the votive prayer, 
too, was one and the same. " Sun of righteous- 
ness, Lord of hosts, glorify Thyself in me." 

Possibly I am speaking to some equally great 
servant of God, though the world knows it not. 
Here, perhaps, before me is one who is to be God's 
Moses, Joshua, Beecher, Paton. But, more pro- 
bably, I am addressing a multitude whose lot is 
cast in the day of small things. There are many 
who know little but monotony; uninspiring events 
succeed each other, day after day, year after year. 
Narrow is your range, limited your outlook. You 
listen with a certain sympathy to the enthralling 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 215 

story of great doings by a great man. But you do 
not feel these things have necessarily anything to 
do with you. Now, believe me, I know the secret 
that will save your life from sordidness and vul- 
garity, and transform it into a thing of beauty, 
touch it to finer issues, and lead it at last to highest 
glory. Do you know what it is? It is that you 
might fill your souls with the Divine ideal, never 
suffer your eyes to forget the vision ; it is that you 
might be of the mould, the spiritual type, and the 
moral character, of this man of the Old Testa- 
ment; it is that you might give yourself to some- 
thing greater and nobler than the thought of your 
own worldly interest; it is that your life might be 
rilled with God. Sometimes, as I walk along the 
streets, I engage in a curious exercise, which may 
make you smile when I tell you of it. I see a 
commonplace man, perhaps in frock coat and silk 
hat, and remember that that man is probably a 
descendant of the sea kings, and I wonder how he 
would look in a winged helmet, and an untrimmed 
moustache, like one of those heroes of old, who, 
descending upon these coasts, burned and slew in 
those terrible days. Remember, these passers-by 
are of the very same blood. In Devonshire, during 
my holiday, I saw labouring men toiling in the 
fields, and remembered these were the descendants 
of those who followed Drake and Frobisher, but 
they did not look like buccaneers. Some of these 



2i6 JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 

men I meet in my daily walks have the stamp of 
vulgarity in their faces. You know what I mean 
by that. I do not mean that they forget the con- 
ventionalities now and then ; I mean that they are 
small of soul, that they are shrivelled in their moral 
instincts; they have no grandeur of outlook, no 
magnificence of spiritual conception, no touch with 
God. What different men from the old Vikings, 
from the Elizabethan buccaneers ! Savage and 
terrible as were those men, you could not call them 
vulgar. A savage is not necessarily vulgar. 
Something seems to be needed to fire and thrill 
the commonplace lives and make them greater 
and diviner than they are. But remember that it 
is not the task, it is the man that matters. I could 
fancy Joshua behind the counter where you have 
to serve; I could imagine this old captain of Israel 
dealing with the commonplace things in the midst 
of which you make your living, and they would 
not shrivel him ; the same spirit, the same magni- 
ficent consecration would be there, too. The man 
who could say about this little corner of the world 
what this poet-captain said in Gibeon would be 
great wherever he was — he would still be Jehovah's 
man. And to you it is possible, if you will only 
learn that it is not the magnitude of the task but 
the way he discharges it that marks a man of God. 
Joshua prayed his prayer about a little district that 
hardly one of you could find to-day. What did 



JOSHUA'S VOTIVE PRAYER. 217 

Gibeon matter on the map of the world? Who 
knows where the valley of Ajalon lies? Tiny 
territories these, but to Joshua they meant that a 
great issue had to be decided, that the tide of battle 
was going for or against his God — for or against 
his sense of what was true and right. So the 
victory had to be won, and he was ready ; hence 
his prayer: " Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon," 
and that squalid territory has been made glorious 
for all time because the prayer was prayed. Most 
of us can see at one time or another what needs to 
be done to make our world better than it is ; we can 
put our ringer upon what is wrong : how few of us 
care to take much trouble to put it right! " Many 
there be that say, ' Who will show us any good ? * 
Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance 
upon us." We have a nobler warfare than Joshua 
ever saw. May we wage ours as well as he did his ! 
It is to realise the Kingdom of Christ in the hearts 
of men. And God needs men of Joshua's stature 
for that conflict to-day. Rise, then, young men 
and old, who have heard the voice of God speaking 
in your own hearts or seen His vision in splendour 
in one moment of exaltation. Never let your light 
go down from the point where He has placed you 
to witness Him. " The path of the just is as the 
light of the dawn which shineth more and more 
unto the perfect day." 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 



" He said unto them, How is it that ye sought me ? Wist 
ye not that I must be about My Father's business ?" — Luke ii. 4g. 



XIII. 
OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

THE incident recorded in this text and its con- 
text has been variously interpreted and com- 
mented upon. With the more familiar of these 
interpretations and comments you are doubtless 
acquainted. Such mediaeval writers as St. Bona- 
ventura, for example, have explained it somewhat 
in this wise : Here is a supernatural Being, ap- 
parently a child, standing in the midst of the 
doctors of the Temple, and by his wonderful, 
divine — indeed, supernatural — knowledge dis- 
comfits them. The reputed parents of the little 
one come to seek him, but he, in anticipation 
of that later day when he said to his mother, 
"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" re- 
minds them that his converse is in heaven, not on 
earth; that he is dealing with the things of his 
heavenly Father, and has neither time nor mind 
to think about those of his earthly father. So, in 
reply to their remonstrance, " Son, why hast thou 
so dealt with us? Thy father and I have sought 

P 



222 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

thee sorrowing," he seems to say, "Thy son? I 
know no father, no mother, on earth, but I must 
be about my heavenly Father's business." The 
explanation partakes of the thaumaturgical from 
first to last; it is certainly interesting, it con- 
tains a great deal of truth, but I do not think 
it is the explanation in which your minds and 
mine will be able to rest. There is another and 
far different explanation, which I like very much 
less, yet even it contains a truth. It runs thus: 
There was nothing very wonderful in the reply 
which Jesus made to the interrogatory or the re- 
monstrance of his mother. He had been about his 
earthly father's business; probably they had left 
him in charge of it; and, feeling that he was doing 
right, seeking their will, consulting their interest, 
he was justified in his reply, which was a remon- 
strance, "Why are you surprised? I have been 
doing what you asked me to do; I have been 
looking after this earthly father's business, and 
if for the moment you find me in the Temple, 
what of that? " 

There is a third and far more probable explana- 
tion, which, though it excludes some part of both 
of these, includes what is worthiest in them. It 
is this : It was the custom for the children of Jewish 
parents to be brought up to Jerusalem at certain 
feasts that they might be introduced to the Temple 
worship. The feast of the Passover, for example, 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 223 

might be regarded, from the child's point of view, 
as analogous to the ceremony of confirmation in 
the Church of England. When the child was 
brought into the precincts of the Temple he was 
necessarily brought under the tutelage of the 
doctors. He was to be a catechumen; they were 
to ask him questions, he was to give his replies; 
they were to provide him with instruction in the 
history of his country and the religion of ancient 
Israel. So Jesus, at the feast of the Passover, and 
just as he was entering upon adolescence, was 
brought up that this great change might pass upon 
his experience, that he might be taught by those 
who were able to teach, and that he might enter 
into the ranks of those who were fitted to join 
in the Temple worship. It is not surprising that 
Jesus, being Jesus, should have astonished these 
doctors by his wisdom, by his answers; but, re- 
member, it was a childish consciousness that dis- 
played the wisdom and gave the answers; and we 
are not told that the doctors sought him in Nazareth 
and endeavoured to discover more concerning this 
youthful prodigy. But, seeing that Jesus had been 
placed in the Temple by Joseph and Mary them- 
selves, and that they had forgotten and started 
on their homeward way without him, he was 
entitled to make the mild remonstrance he did. 
When he replied to his mother's question he said, 
in effect, "Why are you surprised? How is it 



224 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

that you sought me? You placed me in the 
Temple; in the Temple I stayed. You have been 
teaching me all about a heavenly Father; I have 
been learning from your lips for twelve years about 
my God. You have brought me to the Temple, 
to the very centre of Israel's worship. I am 
learning still. Wist ye not that I must be about 
the things of my Father?" 

This, I feel, is the true explanation of this in- 
cident. The childish consciousness of Jesus was 
filled with God; His parents — that is, if we allow 
for the moment to pass the suggestion that all 
men thought His parents were Joseph and Mary — 
had placed Him in the Temple, in the Temple He 
stayed, learning all He could about the God to 
whom these very parents had introduced Him. 
Now, as He goes forth from the Temple to return 
to Nazareth and be subject unto them, He is richer 
and larger in experience than He was before. 
" Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in 
favour with God and man." 

Doubtless some will feel a certain prejudice, if 
I do not remove it, against too fine an analogy 
being drawn between the consciousness of Jesus 
and their own. There is hardly a man but who, 
in kind if not. in degree, possessed the conscious- 
ness of God in childhood which Jesus exhibits 
here. Many men who have lost their sense of 
God had it when they said, " Our Father," at 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 225 

their mother's knee. What I want you to under- 
stand before we go any further is that this sweet 
consciousness of the presence of God which Jesus 
possessed in its fulness, you had also in kind before 
you came out into the busy world to take your place 
in life, and to maintain your footing there. In 
quality, it may be, yours was not the pure un- 
clouded spiritual consciousness of Jesus, but I do 
not want you to put Him on one side and all 
humanity on another, and effect a separation in 
experience and character between the two; rather 
let us bring the two together, and say that the 
God who seemed so real to you in your childhood, 
of whom you learned from praying parents, was 
just the same God, and you had the same con- 
sciousness of Him up to a point, as Jesus Christ 
Himself. The simplicity of childhood in regard 
to the things of God often shames us now. 

There rises to my mind as I speak one sweet 
little incident of a fortnight ago which did me great 
good. It was during a time when I was passing 
through a not very serious controversy, but which 
had found its way into the papers, and into the 
home of a certain clergyman of the Church of 
England. The father and mother were speaking 
of this incident over the breakfast-table. Their 
only child, a little girl, was present ; she had never 
seen me, she had only heard my name from her 
father and mother, who are my friends. Presently, 



226 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

in her childish treble, she asked whether Mr. 
Campbell were in trouble. They said " Yes." 
"What is it?" "Oh, they are saying he is a 
bad man." " Is he a bad man? " she said. Her 
father very stoutly and courageously answered that 
he was not; whereupon the little mortal slipped 
down from the table and went away. They did 
not seek her or follow her. Presently she re- 
turned, and climbing back into her chair at the 
breakfast-table, said, "It is all right." "What 
is all right, my dear?" "About Mr. Campbell. 
I have told God about it. So that's settled." I 
think I can presume far enough on the tender- 
heartedness of fathers and mothers to say that 
when the letter of the parent of that child reached 
me, telling me of the incident, somehow I did feel 
as if it were all right. " Their angels do always 
behold the face of My Father." Some people are 
able to retain that sweet unclouded consciousness 
of God all their lives. Some of us lose it, if only 
for a time. 

More than once I have referred from this pulpit 
not only to the work, but to the character of C. H. 
Spurgeon. One ingredient in the character of that 
great preacher undoubtedly was his child-likeness 
of spirit. His consciousness of God was very 
much like that of the sweet little one of whom I 
have just told you, and both resemble that of the 
Jesus who stood in the Temple. It is said that to 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 227 

his last day Mr. Spurgeon was in the habit of 
speaking to God as simply about the things of 
his daily life as though he were a little child 
standing at his mother's knee. At the close of 
his financial year he would present to God his 
account of his Father's business. If his helpers 
and church officers told him that ends could not be 
made to meet, Mr. Spurgeon asked them to be 
perfectly certain of their facts; the columns were 
to be added up again, the balance was to be struck, 
and if it was on the wrong side, down knelt the 
great servant of God, big child that he was, and 
talked about it to his heavenly Father in this way : 
" Our Father, this is not our business; this is Thy 
business; these are the accounts of God; this is the 
record of the work of God; we leave the adverse 
balance to the wisdom of God." He never was 
put to shame; the child-like quality, the unselfish 
devotion, the brave consecration of C. H. Spurgeon 
did the work. God honoured it; it is going on 
to-day. But Spurgeon was not a child. If I were 
to endeavour to draw an exact parallel between 
Jesus in the Temple and C. H. Spurgeon in the 
Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit I should lead you 
wrong. There was no such exact parallel, because 
the time came when Jesus, like His great servant, 
ceased to be a child. He visited Jerusalem again, 
and stood before the doctors; but this cime He 
saw with larger, other eyes; the Jesus who, as a 



228 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

child twelve years old, had listened to them and 
asked them questions came back the divinely 
inspired Prophet of God and Saviour of men. 
This time he saw clear through their practices, 
character, conduct; He did not need to ask them 
any questions; He had been taught from above; 
and so the scourge of small cords was plaited, 
the money-changers were driven out, and Jesus 
took the place of the doctors, the zeal of the House 
of His Father having eaten Him up. He needed 
not to justify His conduct ; they shrank from before 
Him, these miserable bargain hunters and creatures 
of the time. Jesus had taken the place of the 
doctors now — a child no more, though child-like 
in spirit ever, child-like even now upon the throne 
of the universe. It is the same Jesus that said, " I 
must be about My Father's business," who de- 
clared, " Make not My Father's an house of mer- 
chandise." 

This incident shows Jesus' attitude to life. 
Listen to these three " nots." It was not a deter- 
mination to be a good man and to live a straight 
life; it was something so much bigger than that 
that I can almost see you smile as I try to put the 
words into the mouth of Jesus and see how they 
will fit. Imagine Jesus standing before the doctors 
a second time, saying, " I have determined to be 
a good man, and to go straight in My dealings 
with men." It would not seem enough, would it? 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 229 

He had to be about His Father's business and 
forget Himself in doing it. Somehow Jesus is 
too great for that particular circle that we have 
drawn. Take another. Fancy Jesus coming to 
the doctors and saying, " I want to enter My 
protest against your way of behaving in the 
Temple, and, if necessary, I am prepared to die 
as a martyr for My opinions." The role of 
martyr does not fit Christ somehow, and the pose 
of martyr never was His. He just went about 
His Father's business. Thirdly, imagine Jesus 
saying, " But I have no concern with these thmgs 
earthly, they are too trivial ; I must be sure that 
my soul is right with God." He never said that; 
He never felt it; He took it for granted. Imagine 
Jesus troubled about His soul ! Now try to range 
yourselves alongside of Christ and enter into His 
spirit. Here are some men who have been trying 
to live a straight life ; it may be that their spiritual 
ambition has never risen any higher, and it is not 
unworthy ; you want to be a good man and live 
a straight life. What a simple prayer! and, con- 
sidering everything, one that is worthy to be 
answered, and shall be answered. But, secondly, 
imagine some of you saying to yourselves, " I am 
prepared to be a martyr, if necessary, in my busi- 
ness house, or in the midst of the public that I 
serve — a martyr for God, and right, and truth." 
Be careful ; do not lay too much stress on the 



236 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

martyr, or you will be alongside of Ignatius and the 
lions, rather than with the Christ, who never talked 
about Calvary till Calvary was inevitable. The post 
of the martyr is not the highest, after all. Lastly, 
there are some whose chief quest is that their souls 
may be right with God. Your prayer is not un- 
worthy, but be sure that you are right in the 
satisfaction that you crave. Getting your soul 
right with God may be a matter of mere senti- 
mental satisfaction, and no more; whereas I think 
there is a higher height to which you may attain, 
another and a more glorious reach for your 
spiritual consciousness; and you must attain it. 
The consciousness of Christ in relation to God 
and to life ought to be yours. 

To make clear why I am saying this, listen to 
this postcard. The writer, whom I do not know, 
is one of the hearers at our midday service, and 
this is his dictum concerning last Thursday. You 
will see he is a man for whom I and many of 
my brethren are bound to have considerable 
sympathy : — 

" I was one of your hearers this morning at the 
City Temple, and was one of those you described 
as longing to find God. For ten years this longing 
has been upon me, and I have done what you said 
we ought to do in order to find Him. I have 
walked humbly before Him, but He has not re- 
vealed Himself to me as I expected. You said 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 231 

some of us must not expect to realise Him, it may 
be, in this life, and yet His Word says, ' Seek, 
and ye shall find.' You certainly enlarged my 
sore, but you did not tell me what to do to find 
God. Is there no balm ? Perhaps you may tell us 
next Thursday." 

There is a plea, a great demand addressed to 
heaven. May I, in all sympathy, ask my brother 
whether he is quite clear as to what he wants? 
You are speaking of a something which you may 
never get, and also of a something which you 
already have. It would be impossible for you to 
have written that letter if you had not already 
found God ; the mere fact that you miss Him shows 
that you possess Him. If there were not a great 
capacity in your soul for the Father, if the Father's 
throne were not there, you would not lament at 
what you suppose is His absence from you. But, 
look, my brother, you must ascend with Christ, J 
not through the doorway of sentiment, into His 
consciousness of God, which yet was sometimes 
sorrowful and in one black moment a sense of 
separation. You must not speak as though all 
life were summed up in this sentence — " To enjoy 
God." It is not so. But having righteousness, 
truth, and love, you have God. The Jesus who 
went into the Temple amongst the money-changers 
went in as a brave man should and fought a 
battle for God, and fought it single-handed; and 



232 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

the Jesus who fearlessly attacked the prejudices 
of His time and the false religion in which so many 
of His people were being trained, the Jesus who 
flung the mantle of His compassion over the fallen 
and the weak, did so oftentimes when His own 
heart was burdened and heavy. What was his 
consciousness of God? A consciousness that, be- 
hind all, after all, there must be the mighty hand 
and the tender heart of the All-Father. He lived 
His daily life in that belief, unquestioning. It 
was not a matter of sentiment with Him, it was a 
matter of consecrated life. So must it be with 
you. It is related of the late Dr. Dale that at 
one time in his history, when he was doing his 
best for his country and had scarcely an hour of 
leisure for himself, a Roman Catholic divine said 
to him, " Dale, when are you going to quit politics 
and look after your soul?" Dr. Dale's answer 
was something to this effect: " I am doing what 
I am convinced God wants me to do, and I will 
leave my soul to take care of itself, or rather that 
God may take care of it for me." 

Now, my good brother, believe this : God may 
to-morrow throw open the doors of His consolation 
to you, He may to-day pour His Holy Spirit's 
testimony into your heart; you may just be as 
sure of God this night perhaps as you are of your 
own being. But, on the other hand, He may be 
telling you to go out into the open and live out 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 233 

everything you have ever seen of God, and live 
it as Christ lived it, serve it as Christ served it; 
then there will come to your heart the inevitable 
"Well done!" that comes to every noble man, 
" Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of 
thy Lord." It is as certain as day follows night 
that the man who in the name of the highest he has 
ever seen lives his life and serves his generation 
must find that satisfaction in his soul. God speaks 
His word of approval; never mistake the voice 
when you are about your Father's business. One 
beautiful thing I want to tell you to make this 
point clear. There is working to-day in England 
a man, of whom most of you have heard, but 
whom I hesitate to name, who is serving in a high 
position, but serving as simply and humbly as 
though he passed his days in a cottage; he might 
be obscure, so child-like is he, and so simple in 
his way of facing life. He is the son, too, of a 
great man, and this is what he tells me was an 
experience of his in relation to that father. He 
said the greatest crisis of his life, the most over- 
whelming sorrow he ever passed through, was 
when God called that father home. "But," he 
said, " I made him my model and my inspiration; 
not that I have ever reached to the height to which 
he towered. In one of my darkest hours, when 
trouble had made me ill, and I lay, as it seemed, 
between life and death, I dreamed that I was a 



234 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

a child again, and when I woke and opened my 
eyes for the moment it seemed as if it could not 
be a dream. I remember turning to look up in 
my father's face, and I felt around me my father's 
arms. Is it too much to suppose that I dreamed 
what was true?" I do not answer his question 
here, save to give it a larger meaning. He 
dreamed what was true; he lost his father, as it 
seemed to his earthly consciousness, for the time 
being; but he lived in his memory, in his atmos- 
phere, and then there came the one moment of 
insight when he felt as if the father was not gone, 
but the loving arms were around him still. If it 
were true of the earthly father, a thousandfold 
more is it true of the heavenly Father. The great 
vision some day is coming to you, my brother 
who wrote the postcard, so certain as you take 
the line that Jesus took about His Father's 
business. 

In one of Charles Reade's works there is a 
perhaps even more beautiful figure. A little child 
is handed over to the keeping of another by her 
own father — not that he wants to part with her, 
but they are poor, and so he gives her into the 
rich man's keeping, making her the rich man's 
daughter so far as a resolution can do it, in order 
to find bread for both. But he stays about where 
she is; he keeps watch and ward over that little 
life until it is matured; and the girl, as she grows 



OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 235 

up, begins to feel that she can always rely upon 
the unselfish love of him who seems but a serving 
man. But her father, as she supposes him to be, 
is cold, distant, and even cruel. The day came 
when he repudiated her with anger, selfish and 
base, because she had brought what seemed dis- 
grace on his name. Then forward stepped the 
serving-man, and flung his arms around her, 
saying, with the fierceness of righteous indigna- 
tion to the man who had evilly entreated her, " She 
never was your child! " Then the girl knew why 
it was that she had felt such rest, peace, and joy 
in the presence of the serving-man. She had 
listened to his language of love many a time, not 
knowing the speaker was her real father. Brethren, 
some of you look very strong, and very wise, and 
very brave, and as though you knew all about 
life; but I know you better; you are just as little 
children. Old father world out there is waiting 
for you, and what he did to you this morning he 
will do again this afternoon, and you feel some- 
times as if your service of him has been repaid 
with, cruelty and baseness. You may turn cynic 
under the experience. Beware! There is a better 
Father — the One that sent you here, the One who 
has made you seek the good, the One who protests 
within your consciousness every time you are 
guilty of a coward silence or an evil speech. 
Listen to His voice; still and small though it be, 



236 OUR FATHER'S BUSINESS. 

it is the voice of the universe ; and when the 
tongue of the world is silenced that voice will be 
speaking still. Go about your Father's business; 
be brave, be true, be strong, like the child and 
the man Jesus. " The eternal God is thy refuge, 
and underneath are the everlasting arms." 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION, 



" Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha 
saith unto Him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection 
at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the Resurrection." 
— St. John xi. 23—23. 



XIV. 
CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

WE have here an account of a resurrection with 
which Jesus had to do, but which preceded 
His own, and was, if we are to accept the Gospel 
records, the immediate cause of His death. If the 
resurrection of Jesus presents difficulties to the 
modern mind, how much more does the resurrection 
of Lazarus present difficulties? If indeed Jesus 
called Lazarus from the tomb after he had been in it 
for four days, one would have thought that the 
Pharisees would never have dared to lay violent 
hands upon the Christ. One would have supposed 
that He must have been surrounded by an atmos- 
phere of awe and terror, sufficient to make them 
avoid the Wonder-worker. But, as we know, it 
was not so. Indeed, the mere fact that He came 
to Jerusalem and apparently called Lazarus back 
to life placed Him in the hands of His enemies, 
and they crucified Him. The only way of getting 
round the difficulty thus presented or of giving 
any even approximately satisfactory answer to it is 



2 4 o CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

to say that the Pharisees did not believe that Jesus 
had really called Lazarus back from the dead. 
This accounts for the cruel taunt hurled "at Him 
as He hung upon the cross: "He saved others, 
Himself He cannot save. If He be the Son of 
God, let Him come down from the cross and we 
will believe." If this man who had healed the sick 
and cleansed the lepers had also raised the dead 
surely He need not die! Again, a much more 
serious difficulty is presented in the fact that 
Lazarus never appears to have said a word as to 
the mystery of death through which he had passed, 
and upon which he might have been expected to 
throw some light. The first thing which we should 
want to know if we encountered a Lazarus to-day 
would be : What is on the other side of the great 
change? What have you to tell us? But no one 
appears to have asked the question or thought of 
it, and Lazarus either had nothing to say or de- 
clined to speak. It is my own view that he had 
nothing to tell. I cannot think that this story is 
other than literally true, and I have given my 
reasons for thinking so before and will not pause 
to re-state them now. The probability is that 
Lazarus had not awakened upon the other side. 
We shall all die to-night and rise again in the 
morning. What shall we be doing in the mean- 
time? It may be that the consciousness of the 
dead Lazarus knew no more of the change and 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 241 

mystery than we shall know between midnight and 
dawn. Yet there are some who would describe 
the story as allegory or parable, and prefer to call 
it so because of the difficulties at which I have 
hinted. If I address such I would say you are 
on common ground with the literalists after all. 
Regard it as parable if you please. We who be- 
lieve in its historicity join hands with you who do 
not on the ground of the sublime and beautiful 
utterance which forms our text. For this, at least, 
has no more than an incidental reference to the 
physical resurrection. "Jesus saith unto her: 
Thy brother shall rise again. ... I am the Re- 
surrection." 

Do you think Martha really understood what 
Jesus meant to convey? In part she may have 
done, all of it she could not until, like the rest 
of the tiny Christendom which existed on the 
morrow of the resurrection of our Saviour, she 
understood that the quality and not the duration of 
the life that she lived was in question. This 
utterance of Jesus, " I am the Resurrection," has 
had a chequered history in the nineteen centuries 
of its existence, and during its progress down the 
ages it has often been hardened and materialised 
until its spiritual meaning has been in danger of 
being obscured and destroyed. 

Let me ask you to reflect upon the actual meaning 
of the word. " Resurrection " (avd<rTa?ts) } means 



242 CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

a rising upward, an issuing forth, a going forward, 
not a coming back. The Pharisees who stood 
around the tomb of Lazarus believed indeed in the 
physical, the coming back, resurrection, but not 
in the resurrection of which Jesus spoke. That 
had not entered into their experience. They knew 
of nothing that related them to it. St. Paul was 
brought up as a Pharisee, and in the writings of 
St. Paul you may see the Pharisaic notion of a 
physical resurrection gradually giving way to the 
more spiritual view, which is that of Jesus, and is 
contained in our text. In Acts xxiii. he appeals 
from Sadducee to Pharisee in these words : " Of the 
hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in 
question." But later in his life Paul, the aged, 
seems to have transcended, almost without knowing 
it, all thought of a physical resurrection, when he 
says to his listening Church: "I long to depart 
and to be with Christ, which is far better." " This 
corruptible must put on incorruption, and this 
mortal must put on immortality." " Then cometh 
to pass the saying that is written : Death is swal- 
lowed up in victory." Not much thought here of 
physical resurrection, but rather the apostolic 
thought is re-stated: " We shall not be unclothed, 
but clothed upon." 

In Christian history the doctrine of the Resur- 
rection has never been quite clearly held, and even 
at this hour, and perhaps in this church, you may 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION 243 

find views which destroy each other concerning it. 
Some would think of those who have passed hence 
as though they were sleeping a dreamless sleep 
until that mysterious morning in the consummation 
of the ages when the trumpet of the archangel shall 
sound and those that are in the grave shall hear the 
voice of the Son of God and shall come forth, those 
that have done good to the resurrection of joy and 
those that have done evil to the resurrection of 
pain. But there are others who would speak, and 
this is the commoner view, as though there were no 
age-long, dreamless sleep, but rather that, at the 
chill touch of death, the soul passes hence into the 
mysterious unknown where an anticipatory heaven 
and an anticipatory hell wait for judgment; and 
that when the Judgment Day dawns we must 
appear in our natural bodies before the judgment 
seat of Christ, that we may receive the reward of 
the deeds done in the body, whether they be good 
or bad. 

Need I say that both these views are utterly 
beside the mark? They were not in the mind of 
our Lord as He stood by the grave of Lazarus. 
The life of which our Lord is thinking is not merely 
day added to day, year added to year, age to age. 
It is the life whose quality is in question. It is 
either a going upward or a going downward, a 
resurrection or an entombment of the soul. Christ 
is the Resurrection, and it is ours to examine in 
what sense He is the Resurrection for us. 



244 CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

When I name the name of Christ, I mean the 
principle of good in the human soul — every human 
soul — the divine life in every man. This life 
divine, this principle of good, finds its focus in 
Jesus of Nazareth, in such a way that we may say 
with perfect truth, in words that are the faith of 
Christendom and its gospel too, Jesus was and is 
the Christ, and therefore was and is the Resur- 
rection. 

Consider that Jesus was the Resurrection to 
Martha, although she knew it not, at the very 
moment that He used the word. He must have 
stood in gentle patience, remembering as He did 
that this poor woman, who was sorrowing for the 
death of her brother, could understand no more 
than the Twelve that Jesus had many things to say 
unto her, but she could not bear them then. The 
home at Bethany was in a sense the creation of 
Jesus. What the previous history of Martha may 
have been we know not ; the good and noble woman 
that she now was Jesus had something to do with. 
She sorrowed for her brother with the sorrow of 
unselfish love, and Jesus had perhaps been the re- 
fined source of it, and whether she knew it or not, 
the Christ Who was before the ages had meant 
for her the uprising of an unselfish and loving de- 
votion. Christ was her Resurrection. 

To Peter, and John, and the Magdalen, Christ 
was the Resurrection in this very hour when He 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 245 

stood before Lazarus's tomb. Presently Peter was 
going to deny Him with cursing and swearing. 
Jesus, his Master, foretelling the sad defection, 
said: "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired 
to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I 
have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and 
when thou hast turned again (when the Christ 
within thee has risen again) strengthen thy 
brethren." Jesus was Peter's Resurrection. 

Jesus was the Resurrection of John. The be- 
loved disciple who had once been a son of thunder, 
who prayed for fire to descend from heaven and 
consume the enemies of his Lord, is the same who, 
in after days, leaves to the Christian Church the 
message: "Little children, love one another." 
" Beloved, now are we the children of God, and 
it is not yet made manifest what we shall be; but 
we know that when He is made manifest, we shall 
be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 
Jesus was the Resurrection life of John. 

Jesus was the Resurrection of the Magdalen, 
otherwise this harlot of years agone had not wiped 
His feet with her hair as she washed them with her 
tears. Never would she have stood weeping at 
the empty tomb for the Christ Whom she thought 
she had lost for ever, had it not been that that 
Christ had already risen within her own soul. 

Jesus was the Resurrection of Paul. This zealot, 
this fierce-minded persecutor of the Church of God, 



246 CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

on his way to Damascus is stricken down. Who 
shall say what it was in the phenomenon which laid 
him low? But this we know, that the voice he 
heard was the voice of the Christ within his own 
heart: " I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." 
Jesus was the Resurrection to Paul, and, Oh ! what 
a resurrection that was ! This greatest soul of early 
Christian history, this man of the ages, this saint 
of all time, was not disobedient unto the heavenly 
vision. Christ had risen within his own soul. 

And the ages through, I seek the same principle 
and seek it not in vain. Consider what issued from 
the tomb of the risen Christ upon the first Easter 
morning, a new principle, a beautiful thing, trans- 
forming human hearts and changing human lives 
into something noble and heroic and holy. It was 
not merely that the body of Christ came forth from 
the grave, but that the eternal Christ rose up in 
the experience of the race. And I would ask you 
to remember this, which doubtless some of you 
are thinking of as I speak : No overthrown good in 
the history of humanity since Christ died and rose 
again has perished utterly. You cannot think of 
a single instance of the kind. The things for which 
saints and martyrs have suffered and died have 
always been victorious in the long run. Men 
perish, principles endure. Take l ;_;rage and con- 
fidence from this source. You never can kill the 
Christ in any age, in any heart, in any witness, in 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 247 

any experience. Christ is the Resurrection and the 
Life. 

This exordium leads me to ask you in what sense 
Christ is the Resurrection for you and for me, and 
to answer it thus : First, Christ is the principle of 
Saviourhood in all the labourers and sufferers of 
the world. And secondly, and not less true, in 
fact it is the complementary truth, Christ is the 
principle of potential holiness in the vilest sinner 
that ever breathed. 

First, then, Christ is the principle of Saviour- 
hood in all the labourers and sufferers of the world. 
Outside of our Church to-day in this vast London 
of ours, and in this illustrious England, and the 
wide world over, following the course of the sun, 
men are not only raising pasans to Christ glorified, 
but they are laying down their lives as Christs 
crucified. Can you explain how it is that to-day 
thousands of men, a mighty army, the real Church 
of God, men and women, too, are plucking others 
from the furnace of fire and out of darkness into 
light, and to do it they are laying down their own 
lives, gladly, readily, gloriously ? What is the 
spirit that prompts ? Not the spirit of a far-distant 
Christ or a Jesus that was, but an abiding, un- 
conquerable principle of self-sacrificing love. It 
is the risen life within the soul. 

And what is true upon the larger scale is true 
upon the smaller, that of the individual. I come 



24% CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

very close to the hearts worshipping Christ to-night 
in this place when I say that all the unselfish love 
you, my hearers, have ever shown in your domestic 
duty, in your lonely task, in the humdrum and the 
commonplace of your daily environment is evidence 
of the power of the risen Christ. And this is what 
St. Paul meant by " the power of His resurrec- 
tion." The Cross is not the end but the means. 
No cross can crush for ever the life which is laid 
down in the service of unselfish love, which is the 
service of God. The risen Christ must issue forth 
and unto victory. The gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against the consecrated service of consecrated 
lives. 

I may address a woman whose life has been laid 
down for an unworthy husband; or a noble hus- 
band whose life has been consecrated to attempting 
the redemption of an unworthy wife. You who 
are spiritually strong know, it may be, the daily 
struggle with moral weakness in the person of 
someone who does not know his own danger, nor 
the extent of your sacrifice. Brother, sister, I 
would link you to that process of the ages which 
means eternal victory. " They that sow in tears 
shall reap in joy." The Christ never suffers in 
vain. Every crucifixion implies a resurrection. 
It were impossible to slay that for which Christ 
died, and which is the joy that was set before Him. 

The principle of good, the divine life, is even 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 249 

now within you rising to its own. Sing, then, 
your resurrection song to-day, for you are of those 
in whom Christ has risen. 

Suppose some of you have lost courage, or are 
losing hope, which is very possible. I have one 
word of comfort to speak to you which none can 
gainsay. It is this — that behind all that you have 
ever attempted in Jesus' name, for Jesus' sake 
(which is for love and righteousness) is the hand 
of Omnipotence. It were impossible for this Jesus 
to be holden of death, and in you, again, He saith, 
in the voice of holy triumph : " I am the Resurrec- 
tion and the Life." 

Then there are many of you, doubtless, of whom 
it may be said that life has become poorer and 
darker since the very object for which you once 
sacrificed yourself has been taken from you, as 
Lazarus was taken from Martha. The grim in- 
truder comes into the dearest experiences and the 
holiest tasks, and obliterates the one and destroys 
the other ! Death never pauses for the pleadings 
of love. If there be any here who feel as though 
death has robbed them of all that made life, I ask 
you to listen to the voice of Christ as it comes 
through our text: " I am the Resurrection." What 
you have loved and served in the dearest that God 
gave you and that brought the best forth from you 
was eternal, for it was Christ. If you have ever seen 
aught to reverence in man or woman, if you have 



250 CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 

ever given yourself in adoration and loving ser- 
vice because of what you have seen that was God- 
like in a loved one, you have seen Jesus, the in- 
vincible life that no tomb can hold. 

" There is no death. What seems so is transition. 
This life of mortal breath 
Is bat a suburb of the life Elysian, 
Whose portals we call Death." 

And think not merely to recall the joy that has 
been. Nay, beloved, those who have been taught 
of Christ think less of the joy that has been than 
of that which is to be. No affinity which is sacred, 
no union that came by the bidding of God is ever 
destroyed by the hand of death, for that affinity and 
that union are expressions of eternal love. 

"'Lord, Thou hast conquered death, we know; 
Restore again to life,' I said, 
'This one who died an hour ago.' 
He smiled : 'She is not dead.' 

•"Yet our beloved seem so far, 

The while we yearn to feel them near, 
Albeit with Thee we trust they are.' 
He smiled : ' And I am here.' 

"'Dear Lord, how shall we know that they 
Still walk unseen with us and Thee, 
Nor sleep, nor wander far away ? ' 
He smiled: 'Abide in Me.'" 

Lastly, I would say to the man whose life has 
been lived in flagrant defiance of the highest God 
has shown him, to the pain-makers of the world, 



CHRIST THE RESURRECTION. 251 

to those who lure other men to evil, and to those 
who have consecrated their own souls to shame and 
wrong; listen, hard-hearted, callous, earthbound, 
you cannot escape the judgments of God. They 
are true and righteous altogether. Because they 
are the judgments of God they are the judgments of 
Christ, and these are compassionate even when 
they are stern. If you will not respond to the 
pleadings of love, God will draw you with hands 
of pain. Let those who have sinned against their 
own manhood be aware of this, that the Jesus Who 
summoned Lazarus from the tomb has not for- 
gotten that wherein you have buried your Christ, 
the Christ that was committed to you when God 
breathed into you the breath of life. And, foolish 
one, why should you court agony and wrap your 
soul in flame ? You are dashing yourself against 
Omnipotence in clinging to the life of sin. Wrong 
doing is always a blunder ! Christ must rise again. 
If men knew what lies upon the other side of 
transgression there would be none committed. You 
cannot entomb your own divinity for ever. The 
Christ Who is speaking within your heart as well 
as mine knows that I speak true, for the voice 
that you hear without is but the echo of the voice 
that has been long speaking within: "I am the 
Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on 
Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And 
he that liveth and believeth on Ale shall never die." 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 



'Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged Him." — John xix, I. 



XV. 

WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

ONE Sunday evening our subject was " Jesus 
on the Judgment Seat," and our text was 
taken from this chapter. In reading the chapter 
I emphasised the verse which is our text this 
morning. On the Thursday morning following a 
Scotsman came to me after the service, and referring 
to Sunday night's subject and to this particular 
text, asked, " Why was He scourged ? " I replied, 
"Because Pilate was a coward; he thought to 
placate the multitude, and at the same time possibly 
to save the life of Jesus; thinking that the 
scourging might satisfy them, he tortured his 
innocent prisoner with the purpose of releasing 
Him." But this did not satisfy my questioner. 
He said, " The occasion of the scourging was as 
you describe it, but this was not the cause; what 
I mean is : If Jesus were the sinless Son of God, 
why was this torture inflicted? Why was it even 
permitted in a universe which is said to be governed 
by a righteous God ? Was it not that in enduring 



256 WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

this agony He endured the punishment that was 
due to human sin ? If not, why was He 
scourged?" I answer, Not because He bore the 
punishment due to human sin. 

Many persons read the New Testament as 
though the Gospel of Christ implied all this; they 
speak as though our Saviour endured on our behalf 
vicarious punishment — that is, a penalty which was 
our due, and the enduring of which released us 
from bearing it. It is true that He endured, as 
sometimes we have to do in a lesser degree, 
vicarious suffering, and endured it for all 
humanity. But it requires to be made clear that 
vicarious punishment can have no existence any- 
where, whereas vicarious suffering is the law of 
all moral life. 

The mistaken notion to which I have referred is 
often illustrated thus. We read in Dickens's 
"Tale of Two Cities" of the French aristocrat 
under the Revolution who went to the guillotine 
to save a friend by personating him ; or we read 
of the Royalist servant, under the English 
Commonwealth, who, attired as his master, suf- 
fered execution to save that master's life; or in 
song and story we dwell upon the records of those 
Highlanders who, in the hope of screening Bonnie 
Prince Charlie, suffered themselves to be taken, 
and not only averred themselves to be he, but 
allowed themselves to be shot, in the hope of 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 257 

saving him. These illustrations have always in 
sermons and in treatises the glory and the majesty 
of the sacrifice that was undergone by the heroes 
in question. " Greater love hath no man than 
this, that he lay down his life for his friend." 
There is something noble in every such case; 
something was undergone by the victim that was 
not his own desert. But do you not realise that 
in every such case justice, or certainly government, 
was cheated ; no real substitution took place ? Had 
it been told to Robespierre and his gang that an 
aristocrat had taken the place of another aristocrat 
it would not have saved the life of the man whom 
it was sought to screen. Had Cromwell known 
that a Royalist servant had taken the place of his 
master he might have honoured the magnificent 
sacrifice of the servant, called him back to life — 
had it been in his power — or saved him from death 
if there were time to do it ; but he would not have 
spared the master — the first death would not have 
compensated for the second. Lastly, the English 
Government would not have withdrawn the price 
that they had set upon Bonnie Prince Charlie's 
head because this or that Highlander died in his 
place. Justice in every case was cheated, or it 
was sought that justice should be deceived. But 
God cannot be cheated, and God is never deceived. 
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? 
Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. ,, 



258 WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? . 

Vicarious punishment will avail for him no whit 
at all. 

There are three considerations I would like you 
to note before we go further. First, if it were true 
— as it is not true, and the New Testament nowhere 
says it is true — that Christ endured the punishment 
that is due to human sin, then God Himself would 
be unjust. It is not just to punish any sinless 
victim in the stead of another. Moreover, secondly, 
such punishment, even if it were just, ought to be 
an equivalent for the punishment that would have 
been inflicted in the other case. Did the passion 
of our Lord take the place of the punishment that 
has descended upon sin since humanity began ? 
The three hours' agony upon the Cross, mysterious 
as it was, and one cannot speak of it without the 
utmost reverence, is never represented in the New 
Testament as an equivalent for anything; more- 
over, that which is temporal is no equivalent to 
that which is eternal. Finally, I ask you to re- 
member, that whatever may be the truth about the 
justice of God or the infliction of vicarious punish- 
ment, the penal consequences of sin are endured 
in this life, not always, but very commonly; per- 
haps oftener than we realise, and sufficiently often 
to lead us to the conclusion that the universe is 
organised for the vindication of righteousness. 
Even penitence does not do away with all the con- 
sequences of a man's wrong-doing. As I speak, 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 259 

I think of a man who lies in prison far from here, 
and who but a short time ago occupied a high and 
honourable position in the world. Like many 
others, he misappropriated money that did not 
belong to him, with the full intention of making 
restitution before the world knew. Call it by what 
name he might, it was felony, and for felony he 
had to go to prison, and his family is ruined. 
Presently the newspapers will say his sentence has 
expired, his punishment is over, he is a free man. 
Everyone of us knows perfectly well that his 
punishment is not over, and will not be over while 
he lives; the bar.sinister is placed across that man's 
whole career. He is a man of some fineness of 
feeling, religious training, moral instinct; he will 
suffer not only in his own disgrace, but in what 
he has brought upon his dear ones, and he must 
suffer until the end of his life. If that suffering 
is to be regarded as a mark of the implacability 
of God, the only word to describe it is unrelenting. 
In my view, however, these penal consequences of 
his guilt are not a mark of vindictiveness nor of 
vengeance, but rather of the mercy of God. The 
point I wish immediately to make is : That no 
vicarious punishment of anyone else has availed, 
or can avail, to screen that man from what he is 
undergoing. 

These three things, then, amongst others, lead 
me to say the Gospel of Christ nowhere speaks 



2 6o WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

about vicarious punishment, or of penalty remitted 
because someone else undergoes something; but 
it does speak of a magnificent truth, the full 
meaning of which you will never exhaust until 
you stand where pain and sin are no more. Christ 
was not crucified, Christ was not scourged, Christ 
suffered nothing, because you are to get off what 
you rightly deserve; and what applies to you 
applies to all humankind. His suffering for you 
and for me is that which has drawn us to His 
Cross to-day, and makes us bow low at His feet 
and acclaim Him our Sovereign and our Lord. I 
will tell you why He was scourged. It was be- 
cause He deliberately chose to identify Himself 
with humanity. In its joy and sorrow, its heights 
and depths, its peace and pain, Jesus laid Himself 
alongside human experience, sin-stained and grief- 
stricken as it is. If there is one thing that is un- 
mistakably written on almost every page of the 
New Testament, it is, that in the consciousness of 
Jesus His life was a voluntary offering (never re- 
voked) for the sake of humanity. He came to 
redeem, He came to break sin's spell, and He 
seems to have been conscious all the time His 
mighty work was going forward that it was His 
own wish, His own choice. He had surrendered 
the glory He had with His Father, and entered 
into the human lot. Mr. H. G. Wells has written 
many interesting books, but none, in my judg- 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 261 

ment, quite so interesting or so helpful, as " The 
Wonderful Visit." An angel blunders into this 
world from some other dominion in which there 
is no sin and no sorrow. The able novelist goes 
on to depict his experience : how no one will be- 
lieve, except the man who has happened to shoot 
him as a strange bird, that a being from another 
world, purer and nobler and gladder than this, 
has arrived in ours. He tells of the surprise, the 
bewilderment of this poor celestial being at what 
he meets and has to suffer at human hands and 
in human conduct. In the end he departs without 
having done very much good, but having suffered 
a great deal. Whether Mr. Wells thought of it 
or no, I cannot say, but here is a picture, up to a 
point, of exactly what the New Testament declares 
Jesus was and did, but with this essential dif- 
ference: while the angel appears to have been 
taken unawares, and is utterly at sea, and fails to 
understand this poor world into which he has en- 
tered, and goes out again utterly beaten and broken 
by human depravity, Christ is represented in the 
New Testament as coming into it, a sinless Being, 
knowing what heaven means, and what this world 
would mean if there were no sin in it. He de- 
liberately pits His sinless character against this 
sinful world, and conquers. True, it tortured 
Him, and it slew Him, but He was the Victor in 
His death. There was one thing which sin never 



262 WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

could make Him do, it could not make Him sin. 

This is why He was scourged, but the scourging 
was a mark of His victory. He need not have 
been scourged if He had taken another way, and 
became the victim of sin instead of its Master. 

One thing more. In a certain sense Christ is 
humanity. I trust I do not speak too mystically 
when I say humanity is a unit. We have a 
common consciousness, if we could get down to it, 
and it is undoubted that, for good or for evil, we 
are bound together by invisible but infrangible 
bonds. Christ felt this, asserted it; we belong to 
Him, and He to us. He came to His own, and 
His own received Him not. The identification be- 
tween His experience and ours could not have 
been closer, but it meant suffering for the sinless 
Son of God, and all the more so because He saw 
further than any child of time has ever been able 
to see. Consider the world into which Christ 
came. The poor, jaded Roman world had lost its 
illusions. A recent writer has told us that, to all 
appearance, at that time ideals had been buried 
for ever, all thinkers turned cynical, humanity had 
ceased to believe in itself, and it looked as if there 
were nothing in it, no element of promise or 
potency that could lift it again and give it a fresh 
start upon the pathway of righteousness and 
truth. Then Christ came, bringing a new 
breath from the heights, a new light from heaven. 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 263 

For the first Christians astonished their contem- 
poraries by the exuberance of their joy and the 
grandeur of their unselfishness; there was a new 
creation. Why? Because a sinless life had been 
lived — just one — and whatever it was that enabled 
that sinless life to be lived, that the first Christians 
claimed for themselves and lived too. The same 
Gospel is living now. It cost Christ, as you see, 
misunderstanding, travail of soul, His Gethse- 
mane, His scourging in Pilate's hall, and His 
death upon Calvary. It was inevitable, it had to 
be so ; but the power, whatever it was, that gained 
Him His victory, that became available im- 
mediately for the penitents in the world. Chris- 
tianity was born and is conquering because of that 
victory of Christ. John Stuart Mill has some- 
where said there is no guarantee that good will 
ultimately conquer evil anywhere. Why do we 
assume that it will ? It is easy to answer that 
question now. Why is good to conquer evil ? 
Why is any good man or any ordinary man who 
meditates a heroic deed certain that he is on the 
winning side in the long run ? It is because a 
sinless life was lived, because the Christ could not 
be crushed, because whatever made Christ a 
conqueror over the world's sin is available in 
making you victor over yours. If humanity is 
one, and Christ is the Soul of it, we have in the 
scourging of the Master only the price that was 
paid for a victory that lasts for all time. 



264 WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

Three illustrations will make my meaning 
clearer. Some time ago I watched with sympa- 
thetic interest the sorrow of a household in which 
were two sisters devoted to one another. One of 
them was dying of a painful disease, and the other 
one said to me, "It is terrible to look on and feel 
helpless." We know what she meant. Hardly 
a man or a woman but has felt like that. " Oh ! " 
she added, "if I could but have the disease too; 
if I could but let her know that I am suffering 
the same pain, it would be some satisfaction to 
me." It would have been none to the poor in- 
valid, but we know what was meant by the watch- 
ing sister; it was the solicitude of sympathy — if 
she could just share in the ill it would have been 
something as an expression of her love. There 
is one illustration of the mind of Christ, the desire 
of the Redeemer. Sorrow has passed upon all 
men ; man is born to trouble as the sparks fly up- 
ward. The problem of grief is only one side of 
the problem of sin. Whatever their relation may 
be, we never can consider apart the question of 
pain and the question of wrong. Jesus, in His 
unswerving, undeviating attitude of love, took the 
position assumed by the sorrowing sister : He 
would enter in, He would search the depths of 
human experience, He could not save from with- 
out. There is nothing mechanical about moral 
deliverance; He had to come within, share and 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 265 

share between God and man. This is the atone- 
ment, or, as I prefer to call it, the at-rightment of 
the sin of the world. 

Again, I have somewhere read of a French 
veteran in the Franco-German War, whose first 
service for his country had been as a boy in the 
army of the great Napoleon. In the evening of 
his days he went out to fight his country's battles 
once more, for even the old men were called out 
when the Germans invested Paris. This brave old 
soldier had one grandchild, a boy who was to him 
as his own life — nay, dearer. The little fellow had 
got into bad companionship somehow, and was in- 
duced, in an hour of frolic, to steal through to 
the German lines, and there he and his guilty 
comrades sold the secret of French weakness at a 
certain spot in the defences of the doomed city. 
When he came home again, conscience smote him 
in the middle of the night. He stole to his grand- 
father, and, putting the money by the bedside, 
told his story, made his confession, sobbed out his 
anguish. The old man said nothing, but, rising 
from his couch and putting on his accoutrements, 
he sallied forth into the night to give the alarm, 
to defend the spot that was to be assaulted. But 
that was not all, that was perfectly obvious; he 
felt that something was due to France. One who 
was as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh and 
soul of his soul had sinned a sin and wrought a 



266 WHY WAS' HE SCOURGED? 

shame, so he never came back. When the vic- 
torious French troops had repelled the foe, he 
marched on alone against the whole German army 
and died. Here is another figure illustrative of our 
Master's work and our Saviour's purpose. No 
figure is adequate to the facts; one can but illus- 
trate. " Consider Him that endured such con- 
tradiction of sinners against Himself." The 
Christ marched against all the ill that had ever 
beset humanity, because humanity belonged to 
Him; He identified Himself, as it were, with its 
shame and bore its burden, for the sin, which 
always causes agony some time and somewhere, 
descended upon Him with pitiless force at Gethse- 
mane and at Calvary. He did not turn back; it 
was impossible; His love was too great and too 
divine for that. Forward He went, and through 
the conflict, but in so doing conquered for us all. 
The difference between Jesus and humanity 
is this — that where we have suffered and failed, 
He suffered and succeeded. In His death, the 
death of the Sinless, we have the Just dying be- 
cause of the unjust, and His victory is our hope. 

Lastly, suppose I address one into whose family, 
into whose life, there has come one black sorrow 
because of the conduct of one member of that 
household. That boy of yours has caused anguish, 
disgrace, and scandal to attach themselves to an 
honoured name. Your friends never dream of 



WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 267 

supposing that you are guilty; the lad's father 
can lift up his head now, if he would, as much as 
he did before, as proudly and as bravely; men do 
not think of him as a thief or a scoundrel ; they 
have only a word of pity for him. By-and-bye 
your lad's failure and sin will have been forgotten, 
or, if referred to, it will only be spoken of with 
bated breath — a moment's allusion, and then the 
subject is past. But you — shall I say his mother? 
— you will never forget ; every day and every hour 
of the day you will be thinking of that culprit 
who is trying to fight his way back to honesty and 
truth, perhaps in a foreign land, and your prayers 
daily ascend for him. You suffered as much as 
he suffered ; when he fell you might almost be said 
to have stood in the dock with him and gone to 
the prison cell. He could not have endured more 
than you endured, because, in a sense, you were 
he, and so must ever remain. Now, as he struggles 
back to manhood, are not you struggling too? 
Is not his pain your pain ? will not his victory be 
your victory? and would not you stand for him 
to-morrow against the whole world if you were 
called upon to do it and it would do any good? 
His life is as your life, your life is as his life; in 
a sense, his sin is your sin, and yet you did not 
sin it. You were with him all the way, yet there 
are some things you cannot do for him. Is there 
anybody that can ? I turn back to the New Testa- 



268 WHY WAS HE SCOURGED? 

ment where that mystery of vicarious suffering 
reaches its highest, at the Cross of Calvary, and I 
read my answer there. Why was He scourged? 
Because He felt as you do, because Jesus could not 
leave humanity to its fate, because our failure is, 
in a sense, His failure; our sin, though it never 
was His sin, He regards as His sin. He takes 
our burden ; our defeat He comes to turn into 
victory. This Christ has not quitted His work. 
This morning, as I speak to you, He is thinking 
of us, praying for us, planning for us, and 

"Every virtue we possess, 
And every victory won, 
And every thought of holiness, 
Are his alone." 

All true repentance is a claim upon His holiness 
and the fruit of His victory. It is true to say, and 
in no narrow and inconsequent sense, " He was 
wounded for out transgressions, He was bruised 
for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace 
was upon Him, and with Hir> stripes we are 
healed.' ' 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL, 



" Here am I ; for thou didst call me." — i Sam. Hi. 6, 



XVI. 

THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

THE narrative which is contained in this third 
chapter of the First Book of Samuel is one 
which for the mind of to-day contains not a few 
difficulties. And yet we have no right to ignore 
or pass them over or attempt to explain them away : 
here they are, and the story as it stands we ought 
to be able to build into our experience. Some time 
ago one of your number told me of a remark of 
one of his fellows in this Thursday morning con- 
gregation, to this effect: "When Mr. Campbell 
takes hold of one of these Old Testament stories, 
we know perfectly well that he is going to make it 
somewhat different from anything that we have 
ever heard of it before." I imagine the speaker 
thought that my exposition would be directed to 
explain the narrative away rather than to throw 
light upon it as it stands. Now I venture to 
observe that this morning and every morning when 
we have to deal with Old Testament narrative my 
method is quite the opposite. We never have to 



272 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

explain away when we take one of these venerable 
stories as our inspiration, and as throwing light 
upon our everyday experience; but we have to 
assimilate it to what we ourselves are living day by 
day and hour by hour. It seems to be the bias of 
some people who come to Old Testament story to 
attempt to show how utterly unlike it is to anything 
that we have ever lived ourselves ; and you may be 
quite certain that that is the wrong method to 
adopt. For, believe me, everyone of these stories 
stands in some relation to your life and to mine, 
and God is quite as near to your life and mine as 
He was to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, or any of the 
Old Testament prophets. And, what is more, the 
thing which is true of their lives, and marks 
especially the intervention of God in their case, is 
equally true in your life and in the Divine guidance 
thereof. So when we come to this Old Testament 
story this morning, we shall attempt to discover 
in it what has immediate, everyday value, and see 
wherein it anticipates your experience and mine. 

Well, then, as the story stands, or as we have 
been conventionally taught to regard it, what are 
the facts ? I remember a picture in my childhood 
that impressed me at the time, and I suppose the 
men present before me this morning, who are of 
my age or even older, will remember similar illus- 
trations. This picture I spent many an hour look- 
ing at, and asking questions about it. Samuel was 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 273 

represented as kneeling beside his little bed (and 
it was unmistakably a nineteenth century baby's 
crib), and saying his evening prayer, when, coming 
from nowhere in particular, a voice seemed to have 
arrested his startled attention. Then in the story 
beneath was told in a few words what was a para- 
phrase of the Old Testament narrative — how he 
goes to his Master, Eli, and tells him of the 
mysterious voice ; how he is bidden by the priest 
to return to his couch ; how again the wondering 
boy is addressed by the supernatural voice ; how on 
the third occasion Eli perceived that God had been 
speaking to the little one, and bids him reply, 
''Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth " ; then 
how Samuel is used as the vehicle of a minatory 
message to Eli himself; and how this represented 
the beginning, as it were, of Samuel's personal 
relation to God. Do you think I have stated fairly 
accurately, from what I remember of my child- 
hood's picture, your childhood's notions of what 
is recorded in this chapter ? Let us think if our 
manhood's knowledge is in every particular like it, 
or in any small degree different. 

This first book of Samuel is, like nearly every 
other book of the Old Testament, a compilation. 
It is not one simple narrative written down by one 
single pen ; there are a number of books repre- 
sented here, and the chapter before us is by no 
means the oldest of them; rather it is one of the 



274 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

very latest. The oldest part of the Book of Samuel 
is that which describes the prophet's meeting with 
him who was to be King Saul. This narrative of 
Samuel's childhood post-dates it by centuries, and 
yet, to say so does not necessarily stamp it as 
untrue : quite the reverse, in my judgment. I think 
that the later writer who has given us this third 
chapter, this story of Samuel's vocation, wrote 
down for us what was the floating tradition of cen- 
turies, grouped around and associated with the 
name of the Israelitish prophet. But, as you are 
well aware, from the history of our own literature, 
the moment you write down what has been a tradi- 
tion in people's memories that moment you tend 
to harden and rigidify the narrative, and to treat 
its accidents as though they were essentials. So 
in all probability we have here an unimagina- 
tive scribe writing down, detail by detail, as 
if it were an event recorded in to-day's news- 
paper, something which is really centuries old. If 
we get into the psychology of what that event really 
was, you may find that the details as they are given 
here require to be interpreted in the light of twen- 
tieth century experience. 

Now what shall I say the psychology of the 
narrative really is? Here is an aged priest in an 
imperfectly unified Israel, an Israel whose history 
was not so dissimilar from that of our own country 
but that we can understand how this keeper of the 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 275 

sanctuary at Shiloh was at once priest and judge 
of a people struggling into national consciousness. 
But in his old age weakness of character shows 
itself. His sons do not walk in the way of their 
father ; they have brought shame and discredit upon 
the worship of Jehovah. Either through indiffer- 
ence or through weakness, probably the latter, Eli 
has not been so stern with them as he should. All 
Israel knows of their behaviour ; and one unnamed 
prophet, we are told here in the second chapter, 
comes to Eli and tells him that the judgments of 
God will overtake his house unless this scandal of 
the sanctuary is done away. Eli does nothing, he 
continues in his office; and his sons are by this 
time preparing to lead the hosts of Israel in the 
field. But what kind of an Israel is it that they are 
leading ? Is it an Israel full of moral passion, such 
as Israel ought to have been, the chosen people of 
God ? By no means : the whispering of the cor- 
rupted soldiers would be concerning the incapa- 
bility of their corrupter leaders. How could Eli 
pray for a blessing upon the arms of his sons and 
their followers, who were supposed to be fighting 
the battle of an austere righteousness, but which 
they had already betrayed? 

And yet there must have been earnest spirits in 
Israel then as there have been earnest spirits in 
every age; and one of these, I venture to believe, 
was growing up by the side of Eli himself. Samuel 



276 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

was not a child at this time; the word which is 
here rendered " child " might be far better rendered 
" youth." This lad, on the borders of manhood, 
with a deeply religious nature, pure and unsullied, 
looked with eyes of deep concern upon the state of 
his native land, and still more upon the shame and 
the scandal attaching to the worship of Jehovah in 
his beloved sanctuary. He was very much, I 
should suppose, in nature like the young St. 
Bernard, who led a monastic movement in the 
twelfth century, for although a prophet of the Old 
Testament, he has his parallels in Christendom. 
Of the many religious natures in the history of the 
world, consecrated in youth, undoubtedly Samuel's 
was one. He saw visions and dreamed dreams — 
shall I say, like Evan Roberts of the present day ? 
This young man looked, I say, with the deepest 
concern and sorrow upon the state of religion in 
his country. He did not dare to speak to Eli con- 
cerning it, but he knew of the prophet who had 
already warned his aged friend, and he knew of the 
mutterings of Israel outside the sanctuary door, 
and he must have prayed much and often over the 
problem they presented. 

Now imagine this susceptible youth on his bed 
at night, after his mind had been rilled during the 
day, and many days, with these thoughts, starting 
from his sleep, imagining that someone had called 
him by name. Have you never had a similar feel- 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 277 

ing in times of stress? I think I have. At once 
he hastens to the side of the man of whom his 
thoughts had been full, for he loved Eli, and Eli 
had been kind to him. That which had been a 
thought in his mind had now become as it were 
a word in his ear: " Here am I; for thou calledst 
me." Imagine the natural reply of the older 
prophet and priest: " I called not; lie down again." 
Three times the experience is repeated; the third 
time both Eli and Samuel had been impressed with 
the feeling that the younger had been addressed by 
God himself. And so he had, whether there was 
an audible voice or not. What I want you to see 
is that Samuel's action had been prepared for, as 
all exalted moral action is, by his intense absorp- 
tion in the doings of his time. This call is no sum- 
mons to one who has never before had a thought 
about right and wrong, but to one whose heart is 
grieving and in whose soul a purpose is forming. 
Wide awake now, the lad kneels before God, bring- 
ing to a point a resolution he had been pondering 
as the days were going by and the scandal was 
increasing : " Shall I speak, I, the youngest of them 
all? Is this what God is bidding me do? Is it 
the will of Jehovah that I should speak as His 
prophet, and say what is coming to Israel, that 
which the better heart of Israel already feels con- 
cerning the wickedness that is being wrought 
within the very threshold of this sacred house?" 



27S THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

And when the morning comes the battle is over, 
the question is settled ; the youth draws near to his 
elder, and, encouraged by his interrogation, tells 
him every whit. It is as though he would say to 
him, " I have prayed long over this question; like 
those who love Israel and Israel's God, I have 
mourned over the scandal and the shame that your 
children are bringing upon you and upon this 
house, and now I have to warn you ; I have seen it, 
and my vision of the night seems to confirm it. 
God's judgments are coming upon us all; the 
nation will be driven in flight before her foes, and 
you and yours must perish." Poor Eli! The 
older man knew the truth, the moral, irresistible, 
inevitable truth of what Samuel was saying, and 
the younger man, by speaking, had found his 
spiritual status and his work for God. There had 
been no open vision — how could there be 'in days 
like these ? — up till now a silent Evan Roberts, a 
youthful St. Bernard, centuries before either, he 
stands out and tells the truth without waiting for 
human prompting: " Here am I; for thou didst 
call." As soon as it was borne in upon him that 
He who called was God and not man, he obeyed 
without hesitation the voice of conscience which 
spoke within him. 

I do not believe that the words written down 
here as the lengthy speech of Jehovah to Samuel 
ever sounded in the sanctuary as my voice is 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 279 

sounding at this moment ; but they had been spoken 
week by week and month by month in the heart of 
the listening, praying boy, now thoroughly roused 
when, as it seemed, all that had been working in 
his mind and heart came to a focus at the approach 
of a great national crisis. He goes forth to do the 
bidding of his conscience, which is the bidding of 
his God. 

Now, brethren, if this is how the story shapes 
itself to you, let us see where the permanent value 
of the incident for us lies. I think it is in the 
likeness of Samuel's experience to yours and mine 
in our ordinary every-day life. God speaks to 
every listening ear and to every humble heart. 

" Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 

Of things for ever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come, 

But we must still be seeking ? 
Nor less I deem that there are powers 

Which of themselves our minds impress, 
And we can feed this mind of ours 

In a wise passiveness." 

What I hope you will see with me is not how 
unlike this experience of Samuel's is to yours and 
mine, but how precisely similar it is. God speaks 
to you and me as really as ever He spoke to this 
youth, as certainly as He ever breathed His will in 
the susceptible heart of an Evan Roberts; He is 
speaking in the City of London, and in this church 
this morning. The voice of God may come to 
your soul in any one of a thousand ways, but it 



2$o THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

comes. It may come through the medium of 
another's personality ; more emphatically and more 
likely it may come through your own and to your- 
self alone. I say, however, that it may come, often 
does come, by something which is external to your 
ordinary experience ; but I want you to realise that 
the voice external, as we call it, is only a mode of 
the voice internal, after all. If a modern psycholo- 
gist had hold of this story, and if he had true 
imaginative sympathy with it, as I have tried to 
explain it to you to-day, he would probably say 
all this was the working of a boy's sub-conscious 
mind. We know that those who see visions and 
hear voices, he would continue, in any age or 
generation, hear externally, as it were, that which 
is but the working of some force internal. Well, 
be it so, I am content. If any vision that an Evan 
Roberts ever saw was external, I know it is only 
his own visualised thought; but I also know that 
that may be the thought of God. There is in every 
man's heart an open door towards the eternal, and 
through that open door the messages of God can 
come, and what matters the symbol in which the 
thought is expressed ? It is the Divine word — be 
it in the printed page, be it in the utterance of some 
preacher's voice which seems to you as the very 
echo of your own, or be it simply a whispered word 
that comes to your waiting heart from another that 
loves you — it is still the voice of God. 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 281 

Recently I was pondering over a certain subject 
and a certain course of action, and someone, 
perhaps one of you, for anything I know, sent me 
by post a Scripture text. Probably you wanted 
me to preach from it, I cannot tell ; no explanation 
was enclosed with it. Amongst all the number of 
letters of criticism, advice, and abuse I received 
on that particular morning, this text is the only one 
I can remember. No doubt the sender knew not 
all he was doing; he meant to supply me, probably, 
with something, as I have said, to preach from. To 
me it came as God's answer to what I was thinking ; 
it seemed as if it was the very word for which one 
had been waiting; and you, commonsense English- 
men, would not accuse me of superstitious weakness 
in saying that I took it as what it was, a message 
from the loving Father, from the heart of God 
Himself. What had the sender to do with it? 
Almost nothing, but it was as much the voice of 
God to me as if it had pealed through this 
sanctuary, or, as if it had been that which called 
Samuel from his sleep, truly the voice of God within 
my own soul. There are people amongst us, living 
as it were day by day, hour by hour, even moment 
by moment, in the sanctuary, listening to the still, 
small voice ; and some of them have played a great 
part in the history of our land. There is no more 
wonderful history in Christendom than the history 
of the Society of Friends. I am gratified that from 



282 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

time to time some of those whom we familiarly call 
Quakers find their way in here ; they come to listen 
to the voice of God as the preacher utters it. There 
is not one amongst such hearers but who would 
say he knows it when he hears it. Why? Because 
it is simply the speech of the Spirit within himself 
that has value for him. These men and women, 
who live their lives under the tuition of the Spirit, 
who wait for the still, small voice within their own 
souls, in the small things of life as in the great, are 
doing substantially what Samuel was doing, who 
spent his days and years in the sanctuary. God 
does speak to such waiting souls; and as the fol- 
lowers jf George Fox have done wondrous things 
in the world, so have many humble souls, of whom 
the world never heard, but in whose hearts the voice 
of God can find a hearing. I have read but recently 
— perhaps you have read it too — the story of one 
of these men, John Bellows, a member of the 
Society of Friends, who felt himself called upon to 
interfere on behalf of the persecuted Stundists of 
Russia.* Imagine it: a poor Australian cobbler, 
I think he was; some very humble vocation, at any 
rate, was his. He read day after day, as you and 
I have done, of the sufferings of these servants of 
God in that perplexing country of Russia, until 
one day it seemed as if it were laid upon his heart 

* John Bellows consented to be the colleague of the Australian. 
He himself was a man of position and influence in this country 
The two together made the journey to Russia. 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 283 

to try to interfere and to plead for them. Can you 
imagine anything more eccentric in outward seem- 
ing? This man crossed the sea, came to his 
brethren here, told them his story, went on to St. 
Petersburg, and, amazing as it may seem, pleaded 
the cause of the Stundists in the very presence of 
the Tsar. But there was this difference between 
him and many of those who do God's wonderful 
work in this world : he came home as simply as if 
he had been sent to buy potatoes, and never told 
anyone anything about what he had done. But 
from that hour, it is said, the sufferings of the 
Stundists were mitigated, and the poor Quaker was 
permitted to do what Christians of high degree had 
never succeeded in doing. A man in a far corner 
of the earth had heard the voice of God speaking 
within his own heart, and bidding him stand before 
a mighty ruler in the cause of righteousness. You 
say, why did God speak to such an one ? Why not 
to someone nearer the Imperial throne? I do not 
know. Why did God speak to a Samuel and not 
to an Eli ? Why was there no man of maturer 
years to come from the outer world and speak to 
the priest at the temple and tell him of the judg- 
ment on his house ? Why, because God seeks the 
susceptible heart and the open door. It is accord- 
ing as we live that God comes; it is as we spend 
our days and our hours in the holy place, and our 
hearts are waiting and open, that we hear the voice 



284 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

of God, and are conscious of the Holy One. As 
Samuel was prepared, so Samuel heard the voice, 
and as you and I live as it were in the presence of 
God, does God come to speak to us. " He hath put 
down the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted 
them of low degree." 

Perhaps some of you might say that in teaching 
this I am venturing upon an unusual and even 
dangerous thing. There are people in the world 
with eccentric resolves, which they credit to the 
prompting of the Spirit of God. But, brethren, 
here is your safeguard : God never asks you to do 
anything that outrages the God-like reason he has 
given you ; he has never set you upon the doing of 
any work that meant reversal of what He had set 
you to do before. God never contradicts Himself 
in your experience. If you are sent, as Samuel was 
sent, with a difficult commission, you will feel it 
within your own heart, so irresistibly urgent that 
you must speak; your whole nature, not merely a 
part of it, must speak. Samuel knew well that 
someone must voice the moral consciousness of 
Israel. God was saying so to the whole nation : he 
alone had the courage and the faith to act. Some- 
times people have written to me saying that after 
long and earnest prayer they have been guided to 
place before me a certain situation, and that I am 
the person whom God has appointed to deal with 
it. Well, you know, I cannot help thinking that, 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 285 

if that were so, God would have told me; for, 
consciously, one has not been acting as Eli, and I 
see no reason why some person at the ends of the 
earth should suddenly come, as it were, as God's 
messenger to me and bid me enter upon a new 
crusade that means the throwing down of all my 
work in this present sphere to which one has been 
called by the Divine voice. I notice very often 
that when such a person comes charged with a 
commission of that kind he himself is outside of it 
altogether; no sacrifice is demanded of him, no 
new departure, nothing but to come and say what 
has been laid upon his heart for another to per- 
form. I do not feel that God very often, if at all, 
sends such messengers to His servants. What 
God does, as a rule, is to show as plainly as he 
showed to Samuel some burning need, some un- 
mistakable moral issue, some choice to be made, 
some stand to be taken, in which we or someone 
else must act for Him. When such a moment 
arrives conscience and reason speak with the same 
tongue. 

God may come to me with a word of comfort or 
peace from you, but when God comes to me to ask 
me to declare something which is difficult to declare, 
He will speak directly to His chosen messenger, 
through mind and heart together. It was not easy 
for Samuel, as a younger prophet speaking to an 
elder one, to tell Eli what was really a message to 



286 THE CALL OF SAMUEL 1 . 

all Israel, at a time when there was no open vision. 
It meant the beginning of a work for Samuel him- 
self, a work in which he could not, dared not, spare 
himself, a work in which God would not spare him. 
When God came in vision to St. Paul, remember 
the terms in which the vocation was described to 
the prophet who was sent to him: " I will show 
him how great things he must suffer for My name's 
sake." When God lays a thing upon your heart 
to do, verily very often you will find that it means 
the giving up of something that is dear to your 
selfish nature, it means the fighting of a battle, it 
means the taking of a stand. God may come to 
you in the quick whispered warning of conscience, 
or He may come in the slow shaping of a great 
issue, but know, deep down in your heart of hearts, 
it involves some act of renunciation ; it means that 
you are giving up yourself and your fond am- 
bitions and your earthly dreams before you are 
able to say, " Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth. 
Here am I, for thou didst call me." 

Let me apply this great truth if I can in concrete 
fashion before we separate — this word of God which 
has been given to us. Supposing I am addressing 
this morning some employer who has left behind 
him in the counting-house those who depend upon 
him for daily bread and for advancement in the 
world, and amongst these, sir, there is one whom 
you have watched going wrong little by little. 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 287 

It is no business of yours, of course ; your relation- 
ship with him is simply a matter of pounds and 
shillings and pence; if he fails you, well, you can 
replace him, it is quite simple and easy. Is there 
nothing else ? Sometimes your heart misgives you, 
as Samuel's must have done before the hour for 
action came. Have you no responsibility for that 
life and for the destiny that young man is making 
for himself ? Is there nothing you can do ? It may 
involve a certain sacrifice ; it may mean an anxious 
watch ; it may be that you will have to be his 
guardian from the door of infamy, the good angel 
who turns him back to the strait and narrow way. 
" Oh," you say, " if a man spent his time in 
looking after spendthrifts and roues, well, his life 
would be full of little else; what is more, in all 
probability, he would be a loser by the business." 
Quite so, that is the way God's messages often 
come. You know whether you are doing your 
duty or whether you are not. As certainly as God 
ever spoke to a Samuel in the days of long ago, 
whether the voice was external or internal matters 
not a whit, God is speaking to you when He asks 
you to be a father to an erring lad, a friend to one 
who is weaker than yourself. This is the voice of 
God, and you may have heard it to-day, before 
ever you came near the preacher. If you have not, 
no preacher can make you hear it. Wherever you 
see a strong nature, God has given him to be a 



288 THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 

steward of weaker ones, whether it be in business 
life or at home. We are not units, and we live 
not to ourselves — we are stewards one of another. 
Has God ever said to you that it might be your 
work to fling your arms of faith around another 
man's weakness, and turn it into strength? Has 
He ever said so? Deep down in your heart have 
you heard the still, small voice — or did it reverberate 
like thunder in the tones of some prophet? It is 
the voice of God, and your spiritual destiny 
depends, to a larger extent than you have dreamed, 
upon what you can say in response to that voice. 
Is it, " Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth " ? 

Here again, it may be, is one who is a member 
of a family, upon whom the burdens of the 
rest have been placed. Up to now, you have 
stood between your brother and disgrace, and often 
as he has fallen your moral strength has rescued 
him ; yet sometimes you get wearied of it. How 
little the noblest sacrifices that men are ever called 
upon to make are understood — how little ! It is 
not only the outside world that remains ignorant 
(you are willing that that should be so), but those 
for whom you make them may not understand. 
My brother, when you did for a moment think of 
taking your own way, of studying your own 
interest, of steeling your heart, of doing no more 
for the guilty one, and bearing no more, what was 
it the voice within you said? "Your brother's 



THE CALL OF SAMUEL. 289 

keeper"? Verily, and the Master who spoke to 
you twice before is speaking again, and He whose 
instrument you were, whose outstretched hand it is 
your privilege to be, is giving His commission once 
more. " Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth. Thou 
didst call me." 

Business men, are any of you in this position that 
you must act or be silent when a lie is enacted 
in your presence? Is there something shameful 
being done where your influence counts for some- 
thing? "Oh," you say, hastily and nervously, 
" my influence counts for very little; there are ever 
so many people who ought to interfere before me; 
there are men I can name who stand so much higher 
than I do in worldly esteem, whose duty it is to 
speak the word and put forth the hand; let them 
do it." Are you quite comfortable in this attitude ? 
Samuel might have spoken so the day before the 
final call. I say might — perhaps not. God is 
speaking now ; you are a Samuel ; go out, and take 
your stand and run your risk. It hurts — of course. 
Spiritual manhood is always bought at that price. 
" He hath showed thee, O man, what is good, and 
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 
justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God." 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD, 



"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth : I came 
not to send peace, but a sword." — Matthew x. 34. 



XVII. 
THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

THIS is one of the best authenticated sayings of 
Jesus, by which I mean that it is one of those 
surprising, outstanding epigrams so characteristic 
of His way of teaching. He very commonly 
taught by paradox, and this is a paradox. Most 
New Testament critics are agreed that whatever 
may be said about the longer speeches of Jesus, 
here we have His own terse, forceful, original 
utterance. It will be remembered by all who read 
with interest and affection the words of the Master, 
that after all they are only reported speeches, and 
our Lord was dependent upon the memory of His 
faithful followers to reproduce what He said. 
Jesus never wrote a book, never wrote a line ; when, 
therefore, we discuss the meaning of this saying 
or that, it is well that we should remember His 
method. Some of these utterances, the greater 
number in fact, are of such a kind, so terse, so 
forceful, so clear, that we cannot forget them, nor 
are we willing to do so, and we may take it for 
granted that wherever we meet such an epigram 
we are listening to the voice of Jesus. This is one. 



294 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

Wherever else He speaks in the New Testament, 
He speaks here. What, then, may we ask, did He 
mean? " Think not that I am come to send peace 
on earth : I came not to send peace, but a sword." 

Before attempting to answer this question, I 
ought to remind you of some familiar comments 
upon the text. In the first place, then, it has been 
said that this is either a figurative and symbolical 
statement, or else it was utterly incongruous with 
the teaching of the Master. It has been said, 
often and often, that Jesus was inconsistent, or 
else His reporters were not careful to give what 
He actually said. Is this the same speaker who 
in the upper room on the eve of His betrayal, said : 
" Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto 
you: not as the world giveth give I unto you. 
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
afraid"? The very same. I hope to show you 
that Jesus was by no means inconsistent, but that 
in the upper room the peace of heart which He 
promised to His followers was perfectly consistent 
with the tumult which His gospel was to excite 
in the world and with the strife that it was to 
cause. In the second place, it has been said that 
the meaning of our text is this : Those who seek 
to love and to follow Christ must be prepared to 
endure persecution in some form or other. Quite 
so. But this is not all that the text means. Still, 
I agree, it is a commonplace. It is self-evident 
that those who follow truth, those who seek to 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 295 

serve God, those whose lives are consecrated to 
righteousness must be prepared, as has been so 
often said, to endure the consequences of their 
stand. It was Jesus who said: "These things 
have I spoken unto you, that in Me ye may have 
peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation.' ' 
But this explanation of our text is not borne out 
by the context; it is too obvious. If Jesus were 
to say — as in fact He did say in this very chapter 
— ■" It is enough for the disciple that he be as 
His Master, and the servant as his Lord " — He was 
not speaking merely of a passive reception of per- 
secution, He was speaking of something else. " I 
am come," He said, " not to send peace on earth, 
but a sword"; or, stronger still in the original, 
" Think not that I come to cast peace on the earth, 
I came not to cast peace, but a sword." Who 
holds the sword? Who is to cast the sword? 
Who is to stir up the fight? Jesus Himself, and 
" the sword," whatever He means by it, is to be 
the "sword of the Lord," literally interpreted. 
This text, among many others, has been quoted 
in defence of religious wars, even wars of aggres- 
sion. One of the stock arguments levelled against 
the religion of Jesus has been the amount of blood- 
shed it has caused. In this respect it has been 
compared with the religion of Islam, and con- 
trasted with Buddhism. There is good ground for 
the comparison and for the contrast. Moham- 
medanism propagated itself by the sword, Chris- 



296 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

tianity has not infrequently done the same. 
Buddhism has but little bloodshed to stain its re- 
cord; the history of Christendom is a welter of it. 
When we look back along the nineteen centuries 
of its history, it is impossible not to be saddened 
by what official, representative, organised Chris- 
tianity has done in the name of the Prince of Peace. 
There was an Order in the Middle Ages called the 
Knights Templars, fighting monks who wore the 
red cross on their breast and carried the sword by 
their side. These men were held to be representa- 
tives of the religion of Jesus, and their banners 
were blessed by Holy Church. Nor was all that 
they did evil, but who can acquit them — who can 
acquit the Church that endorsed their practices of 
cruelty and murder, lust and blood ? 

In 1572, on Black Bartholomew Day, the 
assassins who put tens of thousands of people to 
death in the name of religion, wore a white cross 
upon their shoulder or in their hat. The sword 
that they drew was said to be the sword of the 
Crucified. How do we feel about it now? The 
Thirty Years' War, 'which began in 1618 and 
ended in 1648 — one of the most desolating that 
ever swept over Europe — was a religious war, in 
which Protestant and Catholic met throat to throat. 
The followers of Gustavus Adolphus and those of 
Wallenstein and Tilly adopted precisely the same 
motto, and shouted the same war cry : " The Sword 
of the Lord." What do we think about it now? 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 297 

The Inquisition established in the Netherlands lent 
itself to stamping out the liberties of a people; it 
all but did it. The myrmidons of Alva made the 
same claim as Templars and Bartholomew as- 
sassins, and their banners were blessed by the 
Church, and it was held that theirs was the "Sword 
of the Lord." Remember, I am not censuring 
any particular section of the Church of Christ, most 
of the sections have been equally guilty, nor am 
I doing more than illustrate. Censure is hardly in 
place. What I wish you to ponder is this: How 
is it that the religion of the Prince of Peace has 
been held to be compatible with the religion of 
the sword? For so it has been, and the words of 
Jesus have been quoted in defence of the latter. 
We have now come to realise somehow that these 
developments of Christianity were foreign to the 
real spirit of Christ. He would have shuddered 
at the acts of the Knights Templars and the fol- 
lowers of Charles IX., the soldiers of Alva, or even 
of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein. To-day, 
when we read the sentence which I have chosen as 
my text: "Think not that I am come to send 
peace on earth : I am not come to send peace, but 
a sword," we may say they are prophetic words, 
but surely they could not represent the approval 
of Jesus for the practices of His Church. 

In the Russo-Japanese War in one or two days, 
80,000 people fell wounded or dead. One of those 
armies at any rate went into battle calling upon 



298 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

the name of the Lord, and lost the day. But upon 
that same stricken field there came the ambulances 
of the Red Cross. We feel that the symbol 
adopted by the Templars belongs more properly 
to those who are binding up the wounds of the 
suffering and the dying on the battlefields of Asia 
to-day. Men, in practice, though it has taken 
them a long time to learn it, come nearer to the 
spirit of Christ when they use thus the symbol 
of the Cross. Are they any nearer when they 
employ the symbol of the sword? For here after 
all stands the text, "Think not that I am come 
to send peace on earth : I am not come to send 
peace, but a sword," and we see what has been 
the history of Christendom in regard to it. Well, 
I will tell you what it means. It means that the 
Christian character is one which is positive, strong, 
insistent, aggressive; it never can be neutral in 
the presence of wrong. A merely negative atti- 
tude towards sin is not Christ-like, and never was. 
"Think not that I am come to send peace on 
earth : I am not come to send peace but a sword." 
This is why Christianity and Buddhism, for 
example, present such a contrast, as I have already 
hinted. Buddhism is negative where Christianity 
is positive, Buddhism places restraint upon in- 
dividuality, Christianity calls for it to live itself 
out. Buddhism speaks of resignation, pessisism, 
despair; Christianity speaks of conformity to the 
will of God, serious optimism, defiance of the odds 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 299 

of evil in the name of the Lord Jesus. This is 
why Christianity, organised Christianity, has so 
often gone wrong. It is so easy for that which 
is positive to develop a wrong spirit in taking a 
right side. 

Nor am I prepared to say that the word 
" sword" is merely a figure of speech, and that 
the actual sword has never been drawn in the real 
service of Christ. I am not prepared to say it. 
I have listened to Nonconformist orators standing 
in this pulpit addressing cheering thousands with 
encomiums of old-time Puritanism, forgetting that 
Puritanism was a thing of blood and iron some- 
times, and much of the time, too. Before they 
have finished their speech, as a rule, these same 
Nonconformist orators have, without discrimina- 
tion, denounced the use of force in any form what- 
ever, and in any century, or in any clime. They 
have appealed to a right sentiment, and they have 
appealed with conviction. It is not consistent, 
they would say, with the Spirit of Christ, to 
butcher men in cold blood. They were right if 
they referred to the spirit of modern wars, even 
that one to which I have already made reference, 
and the horror of which has moved the sympathy 
of British people thousands and thousands of miles 
from the scene of conflict. It was begun in a 
most cynical manner, and in a most covetous 
spirit. These two nations are struggling for a 
market. Old-time Puritanism never thought 



3oo THE SWORD OF THE LOUD. 

about a market. It is written of the late Henry 
Ward Beecher, in his authorised biography, that 
when the terrible struggle began on the American 
continent, one of the most terrible in history be- 
tween men of the same household, the same blood, 
speech and flag, he, the spokesman of the liberties 
of the slave, gave himself to moulding bullets, 
and when his sister came into the room to ask 
him why he was doing that, and for what purpose 
he was fashioning these messengers of death, 
his grim answer was, " To kill men! " The rifles 
that he paid for and sent to the front were labelled 
" Beecher's Bibles," and in the whole of the 
United States during that awful year the man who 
would have held back at the call of the colours 
when he was needed in defence of his country and 
of the liberties of the oppressed would have been 
rightly named a coward. There are times — they 
may come again — when the Christian man might 
have to stand out — I respect the convictions of the 
Quaker, who could not — the Christian man might 
have to stand out for truth, and peril his body and 
his life in doing it. If so, he draws the " Sword 
of the Lord," and not always in history has the 
sword been drawn in vain on the side of Christ. 

But the principle of our text would still hold 
good, would still remain a Divine command, even 
if all swords had been beaten into plough-shares 
and all spears into pruning-hooks. The very 
victory of the Christ will do that by-and-bye in 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 301 

days to come, which neither you nor I will live to 
see. Such a war as that now raging between 
Russia and Japan will be utterly impossible, for 
Christ will be the Victor, and yet there will remain 
in that day exactly what is fronting us now. There 
is not one amongst us but is called upon to accept 
a sword from the hands of Christ and enter the 
stricken field. I would fain show you all how 
this may be. Take church-going for example. It 
is a commonplace to say now that there is a decline 
in church attendance. It is a commonplace, but 
it is not wholly correct. I think I know a little 
too much of history to believe it. There is a tem- 
porary and comparative decline in church atten- 
dance, but if you will go back through the cen- 
turies of the history of this very country you can 
come upon times that were worse, and the only 
times that were better were when men were sent 
to Church at the sword point. I prefer these days 
to those. Perhaps, however, the pessimists are 
right who assert that in the temporary decline of 
church attendance the cause is to be sought in an 
indifference to the things of God. Perhaps, I 
say ; i am not sure. More likely it is want of 
understanding of the true mission of the Church. 
The phrase "church-goer" is very objectionable. 
Church-goers may not be Christ's-doers. I am 
sometimes inclined to believe with Bishop Welldon 
that there are too many preachers nowadays. It 
is not preachers that we want; when God needs 

XJ 



302 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

them He sends them, and the people hear them, 
men cannot but hear them. But what we do want 
is that the churches should be camps, whence go 
forth the soldiers of the Lord carrying in their 
hands the fiery cross; every man in the camp 
in earnest for righteousness' sake, and prepared 
to do as well as to hear. This morning there is 
a great assembly met together as we say to wor- 
ship. Not one-fifth of you came here to worship. 
You came here to listen to a sermon, and that 
is for the most part the spirit of church attendance 
everywhere in this nation. Comparatively few 
understand the simple worship of God, apart from 
what God's messenger has to say. Will we ever 
understand that what we as followers of Christ are 
asked to do is to put our hand to the plough or to 
cast the fire upon the earth, to wield the sword of 
righteousness in His great name ? Church-goers, 
Christ-doers, listen to your Master. If you would 
know what the peace of God means, be prepared 
for war. " Think not that I am come to send 
peace on earth ; I am not come to send peace, but 
a sword." 

Take again the private life of the people before 
me. Young man, what is it to be a Christ-like man ? 
Does it mean that you are to seek to cultivate 
devotional feelings, abstain from fellowship with 
mankind, and prepare for heaven ? I need hardly 
say that it does not. Many people come to me 
with a difficulty of this kind; it is so common that 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 303 

I do not hesitate to refer to it. " How am I to 

feel that I possess God and that God possesses me ? 
I have no consciousness, no sense of the presence 
of God." How many of you now in this con- 
gregation this morning feel like that? There are 
some of you, I doubt not, who do not want to find 
God, who, as a matter of fact, are conscious of 
no lack in not possessing Him. But there are 
others who with all their might desire Him. These 
latter shall have the experience. But let me tell 
you the way to it. Stop worrying about it, rise, 
take up the sword of the Lord, do something for 
righteousness' sake. " He that willeth to do His 
will, he shall know of the doctrine." The one 
great thing that this age needs is a revival of 
moral earnestness, come how it may, not neces- 
sarily of devotional feelings, nor of what you call 
" the sense of God." The sense of God will come 
— surely come — along the line of high duty, the 
oblation of self upon the altar of holiness. " I am 
not come to send peace, but a sword." There has 
been sent to me a copy of a play running on the 
boards of a London theatre. It is called " The 
Prayer of the Sword," and the theme is some- 
what on this wise. A young monk in a religious 
house in the year 1500 is represented as in colloquy 
with himself; he is discontented with the ideal to 
which he is committing his life. He begins to 
question whether it is the highest. The writer of 
the play seems to have in his mind — I do not say 



304 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

that he had — that the monastic ideal was neces- 
sarily a lower one than that which he sets before 
the young monk or expresses in his words. It 
was not, you know. There were two monastic 
ideals. One was that described in Milton's phrase, 
"the fugitive and cloistered virtue" — that of the 
man who wished to escape the world's unpleasant- 
nesses, and so betook himself behind stone walls, 
and led there the contemplative life. That was one 
way. But the true monastic ideal was never that, 
it was the ideal of men who were sick of the world's 
shams and vanities and pomps and cruelties and 
rewards, and fled from it, not to avoid it, but to 
serve it, and these men living together, a com- 
munity of God, sought in the Spirit of Christ to 
serve the great community that would not listen to 
God. We want that monastic ideal back again, 
whether we have abbots and priors or no. And 
here is the way in which the dramatist makes the 
young monk to speak. He says to himself — 

" Weary of sloth, weary of selfish peace, 
Of useless blessedness ; sick with desire 
For action that will smother Nature's cries, 
And still the torturing consciousness of self. 
Brother I long for some great enterprise, 
Something to strive for or to overcome, 
Some task that I may grapple with my hands, 
With all my body and with all my soul." 

This is the way in which he answers it to him- 
self later on when the struggle has reached its 
crisis in his mind : — 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 305 

"Thy destiny is written on the skies. 
Arm thou the right ; let order's cause be thine : 
Lead thou the slave of freedom ; guard the weak ; 
Arise, and win the equal rights of man. 
Lord, hear my soul that echoes this great call — 
That I who work by prayer might pray by work ; 
Work with the sword, pray with the sword, wage war 
With prayer of sword, on all the powers of ill 
That turn the world from thine eternal law." 

Right, noble, good and true, Christ-like. You 
pray with your whole life, with your hand and 
with your heart, with your tongue and with your 
arm. He who would enter the service of the living 
God must be prepared for the consecration of all 
power and of all opportunity against the hosts of 
evil. You need not become a monk to serve the 
world; serve it in the midst, in the name of Him 
who said: " Think not that I am come to send 
peace on earth : I am not come to send peace, but 
a sword." 

To be a Christian, then, or— I would avoid the 
word — a Christ-like man, you must be humble and 
simple as a little child, unselfish, loving and 
sincere, but you must also be brave as a lion, and 
never shirk a moral issue when it comes. Do not 
prate about peace when there is no peace. The 
peace of God will come into the heart of man, who 
has no fear when he enters the service of the 
righteousness of God. 

I would like to speak a helpful word to someone 
who has an unpleasant, perhaps even a sorrowful, 
task to face to-morrow. You have a loved one, it 



306 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

may be, who has been doing and persisting in a 
wrong. Your love would shield him, you fain 
would save him from himself. But to do so means 
to strike him, and the sword that pierces him will 
go through your heart too. 

A young fellow once came to me in trouble (I 
have told you this before), and when I asked him 
why he did not go with the story of his fault to his 
father, the answer was: " I could not do that yet. 
My father is one of the best men who ever lived, 
strong and true, but he would not let me off. I 
should have to put this right, and put it all right, 
and I cannot face him. I am not strong enough." 
That father, whom I never knew and never expect 
to know, is one of God's men. The sword where- 
with he would have pierced his boy had to pass 
through his own heart too. He could not spare 
because he belonged to Christ. This Christ, who 
pierced His own mother's heart, may have to say 
to you : " What hast thou to do with peace? Get 
thee behind me." " Think not that I am come 
to send peace on earth : I am not come to send 
peace, but a sword." It is easy enough to read 
this, when we go back to the days of Christian 
martyrdom. A St. Perpetua, on her way to exe- 
cution, stopped in the street and entreated by her 
father to give him back his child, looks upon the 
kneeling figure, caresses the grey head with loving 
touch, and moves on to death. The twentieth 
century will say: " Well done," but the twentieth 



THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 307 

century has not eyes to see that you, my brother, 
in your obscure corner, do exactly the same thing. 
But God, the speaker of the words of my text, 
has, all heaven has, and how do you know how 
much heaven can see? "Think not that I am 
come to send peace on earth : I am not come to 
send peace, but a sword." 

Here is a lad again, it may be, who feels him- 
self under the necessity of taking a semi-public 
stand to-morrow against practices in the presence 
of which he has hitherto kept silence. You have 
condoned them by your silence, in your business 
house, where other fellows are lying and cheating, 
and seeking to live the life of the beast, and en- 
couraging one another in doing it. Men some- 
how descend to meet — they are like mountain 
peaks. Every one of those men knows in his 
heart, as well as you know, that he is doing wrong, 
but persists in it, encouraged by the presence of 
the rest, terrorised by them. This poor coward of 
the darkness is very blustering and brave in the 
light. What will you do? You are going to a 
task to which you are not equal, or feel you are 
not equal, but God is sending you to it. No brag, 
no bluster will serve you. What you have to do is 
to dissociate yourself entirely, cost what it may, 
from the practices of your community. Take your 
own stand, take it quietly, for you are not so much 
alone as you suppose. " Think not that I am 
come to send peace on earth : I am not come to 



308 THE SWORD OF THE LORD. 

send peace, but a sword." You have to use yours 
by the very stand you take, but you do not take 
it alone, the Christ stands there too. There are 
some relationships in life which obedience to con- 
science may shatter to pieces. The best and the 
nearest may fail to understand. The temptation 
is to take the easy way. Do not take it. Take 
God's way; you will never be left in any doubt 
as to what it is. I will tell you what God has 
bid me say to you : Fear not to strike a loving 
blow for Christ, though your own heart be bleeding 
in doing it. See, there lies at your feet the sword 
which Christ has cast upon the earth. You are 
called into the ranks of the soldiers of the Lord. 
There is a service for you to render, a work for you 
to do. It is a great campaign in which we are 
engaged, nothing less than winning the whole wide 
world from sin and sorrow and pain to righteous- 
ness, peace and God. It is no doubtful issue, it 
is that God's righteousness is pitted against 
ignorance, error and wrong, and God's righteous- 
ness must prevail. 

" The day of the Lord is at hand, at hand, 

His storms roll up the sky, 
The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold, 

All dreamers toss and sigh. 
Who would sit down and sigh for a lost age of gold 

While the Lord of all ages is here ? 
True hearts will leap up at the trumpet of God, 

And those who can suffer can dare. 
Each old age of gold was an iron age, too, 

And the meekest of saints may find stern work to do 
In the day of the Lord at hand." 






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